For years, the works of Russia’s towering men of letters—Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Goncharov, Turgenev—lay beyond the reach of English-speaking readers. That is, until a pale, sickly, unassuming British mother decided to translate them.

To the extent that 19th century Russian fiction deals with universal themes of human existence — nature, religion, love, death, and, of course, war and peace — these beloved tomes can feel timeless to readers. But the fact is, the English-speaking reading public didn’t get their hands on them until some years after their publication, when Constance Garnett picked up a dictionary and set out to bring the Russian masters to life in her native tongue.

The Brighton-born Garnett (née Black) was a coroner’s daughter, and worked as a governess before becoming a librarian in London’s East End. Her sister Clementina, a writer and labor organizer, introduced Constance to Edward Garnett, the man who would become her husband in 1889. Edward was a publisher’s reader, and was from an aristocratic literary family. His father was the Keeper of Printed Materials at the British Museum.

There weren’t many Russian speakers in turn-of-the-century Britain, but because of growing political unrest in the major cities of the Russian Empire, there were increasing numbers of exiled Russian revolutionaries. And the suggestion that Garnett translate Russian literature came from one of them — despite the fact she spoke no Russian. Constance may have had something of a crush on Feliks Volkhovsky, a bearded bad boy who had escaped imprisonment in Siberia and settled in London. So when he broached the idea, she was amenable.

Volkhovsky was part of a community of political thinkers and writers, and an editor at the Free Russian Press, an emigré journal and publishing house started by Alexander Herzen, the “father of Russian socialism.” Edward Garnett regularly invited members of the Free Russian Press scene to spend weekends at his home. On one weekend visit, Volkhovsky, according to Constance, “suggested my learning Russian and gave me a grammar and a dictionary.”

Leo Tolstoy relaxing at Yasnaya Polyana in 1908. (Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky/Library of Congress)

Once laid up with pregnancy complications, Garnett undertook the mammoth task of learning the notoriously complex Slavic language. One of her first translations was “The Kingdom of God is Within You,” a religious and philosophical tract by Leo Tolstoy. She went on to translate over 70 volumes of Russian literature, including almost everything Tolstoy ever wrote, Chekhov, all of Dostoevsky, and her favorite, Turgenev, among others. In 1894, Garnett took a three-month trip to Russia, and even visited Tolstoy at his estate, Yasnaya Polyana.

Clara Bell, a British linguist, had published a translation of War and Peace in 1886, but hers was a copy of copy, translated from a French translation, not the original Russian, and it wasn’t well received. The first ever English translation of Anna Karenina was done by an American, Nathan Haskell Dole, the same year. But because of the readability of Garnett’s versions, and her close ties to the publishing industry, her editions were printed cheaply and sold more widely than any that had come before. The Russian classics began to find their way into English homes and classrooms. A 1905 article in the Saturday Review, a British literary magazine, began, “Twenty years ago Tolstoy was hardly known outside Russia […] Who has not heard of Tolstoy now?”

Garnett maintained, in the words of New Yorker editor David Remnick, “an ascetic lifelong routine of housekeeping, child-rearing, and translating.” She worked ceaselessly. D.H. Lawrence, who was a friend of Garnett’s, recalls seeing her sitting in her garden “turning out reams of her marvelous translations from the Russian. She would finish a page, and throw it off on a pile on the floor without looking up, and start a new page. That pile would be this high — really, almost up to her knees, and all magical.” In 1921, writer Katherine Mansfield sent a letter to Garnett: “As I laid down my copy of War & Peace tonight I felt I could no longer refrain from thanking you for the whole other world that you have revealed to us through these marvelous translations from the Russian,” she wrote. Of Garnett’s body of work, she said, “The books have changed our lives, no less.”

Garnett’s output was extraordinary by any measure, but is particularly impressive considering that she had a child to mind and spent the majority of her life in very ill health. She was frail, beset by migraines, and suffered from sciatica. Most surprisingly, she had terrible vision, which was dramatically worsened by her vocation, and was nearly blind toward the end of her translating career. But she remained indefatigable, eventually hiring an assistant to read aloud from the original Russian as she scribbled a translated draft.

The work of the translator, when not overlooked entirely, is often subject to extreme scrutiny, and Garnett has certainly not been spared. She reportedly translated with such haste that she occasionally skipped words or phrases that were too difficult to translate well — a fact that has pained purists and native Russian speakers, who think Garnett robs the reader of the richness of the original Russian.

Most vociferous among her critics were Russian writers themselves, most notably Nabokov, whose lectures on literature are peppered with grumpy, anti-Garnett marginalia. He called her work “dry and flat, and always unbearably demure,” and her translation of Anna Karenina “a complete disaster.” Nobel Prize-winning poet Joseph Brodsky, another Russian writer in exile, lamented that “the reason English-speaking readers can barely tell the difference between Tolstoy and Dostoevsky is that they aren’t reading the prose of either one. They’re reading Constance Garnett.”