Olive Garnett and Anglo-Russian Cultural Relations from the Crimean War to the Russian Revolutions, 1855-1917

This thesis analyses the life and work of little-studied writer, Olive Garnett (1871-1958) and makes the case for reassessing her currently peripheral place in literary criticism. It contends that Garnett's works are substantially more than mere footnotes to those of her contemporaries. Garnett wrote with immediacy about a generation-defining moment in Russian history, with her short story collection, Petersburg Tales (1900) and novel, In Russia's

Night (1918) charting the trajectory of the collapse of Imperial Russia.The period 1855-1917 saw instability in Anglo-Russian relations with the British public's mood oscillating between Russophilism and Russophobia. Garnett's career was mobilised against the backdrop of rampant tsarist policies on Russification that contributed to the mass exodus of political refugees from Russia who settled in more liberal western European cities, including

London. The increase in Russian speakers in London resulted in an explosion of English translations of Russian literature, led by Garnett's sister-in-law, Constance Garnett (1861-1946), which fuelled the reading public's appetite for all things Russian. Olive Garnett responded to these developments, drawing in her writing from the experiences of her diverse literary and political network, which included famous translators, authors and Russian émigrés, and writing back to them, producing ambitious texts that both reflect and comment on this pivotal period in history.

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This thesis adopts a triangulated methodology, utilising Garnett's diaries, literature and life to perform a biographical and historical analysis of her published literature and some of her unpublished manuscripts to offer the first sustained analysis of Garnett's work. Each chapter is attentive to intertextual connections between the works of Garnett and her predecessors and contemporaries. These include significant political and literary figures such as Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-81), Anton Chekov (1860-1904), Sergei Stepniak (1851-95), Peter Kropotkin (1842-1921), Henry James (1843-1916) and Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923), whose collective reach spans across Russia, the United States of America and New Zealand. Garnett is not subordinate to these more famous figures, and in placing her work alongside them in a creative and critical dialogue this thesis showcases Garnett's talents as a writer. It also serves to

highlight Garnett's overlooked contribution to the mediation of the political turmoil in Russian to British readers at the dawn of the twentieth century. Ultimately this project calls for a re-appreciation of Garnett's literary output and a repositioning of Garnett as an author in her own

right, for her own narrative, rather than as part of someone else's story.