The Uncommon Reader: A Life of Edward Garnett by Helen Smith review – a cultural battleground
The writer and editor promoted Joseph Conrad and DH Lawrence and deserves recognition as a great literary tastemaker
The first question worth asking of Helen Smith’s A-grade biography of Edward Garnett (1868‑1937) is just how many manuscripts passed across the desk of this publishers’ reader in his lifetime. Very little hard data is vouchsafed, but Smith estimates that, in 1917, John Lane was forwarding him between 400 and 500 items a year. A decade later, the contents of the weekly parcel sent to his house in Kent is put at eight to 10. All this suggests that in a 50-year career, beginning with the firm of T Fisher Unwin and ending with Jonathan Cape, Garnett may have worked his way through 20,000 unpublished novels – 150m words, say, forming a pile that, if laid end to end, would stretch from one side of central London to the other.
Naturally there were times when this decades-long sojourn in what George Gissing called the Valley of the Shadow of Books became oppressive and Garnett began to feel that he was pouring his immortal spirit down the drain a pint at a time. A rather plaintive letter survives from November 1910 in which he informs John Galsworthy: “I get very low sometimes as to the secondhand sort of existence that is implied in the game and its sequelae.” But there was gold lurking among the dross, and a list of the famous names that he turned up in the slush pile would be enough to fill a literary Who’s Who. The Nobel-winning Galsworthy, Conrad and the Lawrences (DH and TE) all benefited from his advice, and even in his 60s he could be found busily annotating the apprentice work of such up-and-coming youngsters as Naomi Mitchison and Henry Green.
Well-researched and neatly written, The Uncommon Reader is, necessarily, the study of a milieu
