December 15, 1930

Edna O'Brien in the title of  her memoir Country Girl: A Memoir, (2012) references her first novel, The Country Girls (1960) which scandalized her Irish parish, and led, fifty years after Joyce, to her leaving Ireland. Now of course she is lauded for her novels, plays, biographies. A president of Ireland has praised her creativity.

We learn from her memoirs that, there were cats in her first children's book, and signs about cats in the woods near the villa she rents to write a book in solitude. But no cats in her household that she mentions, in looking back. I run into this a lot, of course, in researching for these notes, but usually, and I am not sure why, when someone's prose really impresses, they turn out to also like cats.  

And O'Brien's article about Constance Garnett (in the Guardian) is lovely prose:

There is a postcard on my desk of an Édouard Vuillard painting called Two Women Under the Lamp. The room has a warm, welcoming glow, and I sometimes think which of the sympathetic, scholarly women I would like to sit with there. Invariably, I choose Constance Garnett.

Garnett translated 73 volumes of Russian literature, which included Tolstoy, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Gogol, Herzen and many others, .... Chance put her on the life-long path for which she was suited. In 1892, with her fiancé Edward Garnett, she went to Bedford Park to meet Volkhovsky, a revolutionary who had escaped from Russia and was editing an émigré journal called Free Russia. His pen name was Stepniak – a man of the steppe. Constance fell "not a little in love with him" ....[H]e suggested she translate "those splendid Russians". It was a prodigious undertaking for a Victorian Englishwoman who had been a librarian in the East End of London. Her husband helped her with publication, ensuring that the editions be both inexpensive and available to young people. In time they lived separately; but as might a Russian heroine, she wrote to Edward: "Keep a warm heart to me – independence doesn't go very far."

In his life of her, her grandson Richard Garnett describes her, alone in her stone house in Kent, translating and tending her garden; she loved plants almost as much as she loved language. Her life was frugal, her dresses "unambitious", her one seeming luxury a Valor stove with two paraffin wicks, which her adored son, David Garnett, had bought for her. ....

We learn about both authors in O'Brien's comments.