“Olive” Rayne Garnett

Author.

1871 – 1958

A Tribute by Eleanor Fitzsimons

Olive Garnett was the fourth of six children born to Olivia Narney Garnett and Richard Garnett while they were living in St Edmund’s Terrace, in the Primrose Hill district of London. A sensitive and intelligent child, she was educated at Queen’s College in Harley Street, from 1882 until 1889. This was a pioneering independent school for girls. In 1890, when she was eighteen, her father, Richard, a poet, translator, short-story writer, literary scholar and librarian, was appointed Keeper of Printed Books at the British Museum. The family moved into one of the British Museum residences, a tall house that faced out onto Montague Street on the east side of the museum. It was around this time that Olive, who was determined to become a writer, began keeping a detailed diary – her first entry is dated 7 June 1890.

Richard Garnett’s position at the British Museum gave Olive access to Bloomsbury’s literary and artistic circles. She accompanied her mother on visits to Christina Rossetti’s home during the poet’s final illness, and recorded in her diary that her house on Torrington Square was ‘tumbling to pieces’ with ‘no paint left’.

One childhood friendship that endured into adulthood was with writer Ford Maddox Ford. They played together during his visits to his grandfather, Ford Maddox Brown, and his uncle, William Rossetti, both of whom lived in St Edmund’s Terrace and were friendly with her father.

Another close family friend, and regular visitor to the Garnett home, was Pre-Raphaelite writer and critic William Michael Rossetti. He too lived in St Edmund’s Terrace with his family and Olive formed a close friendship with his daughters, Olivia, also known as Olive, (1875–1960) and Helen (1879–1969). In June 1891, the Rossetti sisters, along with their brother Arthur, conceived of, produced, and distributed the first, handwritten, issue of their influential anarchist magazine The Torch. They sold it at political meetings, at railway stations, and in the street where they waved red banners to attract attention. Although she expressed reservations, at the increasingly violent tone of The Torch, Olive aided them in this enterprise. Olive admired the Rossetti sisters for ‘inking their fingers in the cause of freedom’.

As well as helping with The Torch‘s production, Olive contributed several short stories. Fellow contributors included writers George Bernard Shaw and Ford Madox Ford, anarchist feminist Emma Goldman, and artist Lucien Pissarro. At its inception the siblings hand-produced The Torch in the study of their home. As circulation grew, they acquired a printing press, which, at their mother’s insistence, they relocated to the basement. Afterwards, they took to holding anarchist meetings in what became known as The Torch Room. Olive commented on this in her diary: ‘Poor Mrs Rossetti is in a fearful state or irritation, hardly responsible I should say’ she wrote, after helping her friends tidy The Torch Room on one occasion. ‘She will not have a nurse, or anyone but the children to nurse her, and she cannot be left alone… “Anarchy” alone helps to keep the children’s spirits up’. Mrs. Rossetti was desperately ill with tuberculosis and died on 12 April 1894, while she was in Italy with her husband and her daughter Olive.

In December 1894, the Rossetti trio moved the publication to new offices at 127 Ossulston Street, close to the site now occupied by the British Library. In her diary, Olive observed that the sisters were almost the only women who ever went there. She noted that several men slept there at night, and were fed by Olive Rossetti, and that ‘the place is constantly observed by policemen’. She worried for her friend. In her diary, she recorded one exasperating conversation:

Olive’s [Rossetti] conversation unknown to herself was dangerously near the ridiculous. Among other schemes they have one for the conversion of the entire British police force, so that, should there be a popular insurrection in Trafalgar Square, the police, having had their humane feelings awakened by the Anarchists, will cry ‘Brothers, we had rather be bludgeoned than bludgeon in support of an unjust law, we will go in a body & resign’. To point out that the English are not the French, that we like our rulers, that the country is not in the state of France at the time of the Great Revolution, that our contemplated reforms are purely social & can be carried out by peaceful means, has much the same effect as holding out a red rag to a bull.

Olive’s involvement with The Torch was a key element in her increasing interest in, and collaboration with, the prominent Russian émigré community in London. In autumn 1891, her brother Edward invited Russian political refugee Felix Volkhovsky and his eleven-year-old daughter, Vera, to live at the Surrey cottage he shared with his wife, Constance. When Olive visited in November 1891, Volkhovsky introduced the two women to the Russian language. Constance went on to become one of the most prolific translators of Russian literature into English. Back in London, Olive attended a meeting of the Friends of Russian Freedom at Volkhovsky’s suggestion. It was there that she first saw another exiled Russian revolutionary, Sergey Stepniak, who was Volkhovsky’s close friend. The following year, in a letter inviting her to dinner with Stepniak, her brother Edward wrote ‘The great Stepniak is an admirer of your Torch productions so don’t fail.’

Olive documented her first meeting with Stepniak and the intense, platonic relationship that followed. Soon, she was spending Saturday evenings at his home in Bedford Park, dressed in a Russian peasant blouse and conversing animatedly with Stepniak, Peter Kropotkin and Nicholas Tchaykovsky. On occasion, she invited Stepniak to her mother’s Thursday tea parties in the British Museum. Married and two decades her senior, Stepniak acted primarily as her literary mentor. She was shocked to discover that he had been an assassin. Her devotion ensured that she was devastated when she learned of his untimely death. He was hit by a train at a railway crossing on 23 December 1895. In response, she cut her hair short and travelled to Saint Petersburg, where she spent nine months as a governess to a Russian family.

Returning to England, Olive wrote Petersburg Tales (1900), a quartet of short stories inspired by her experiences in Russia. She followed this with a novel, In Russia’s Night (1918). Joseph Conrad was among her staunchest admirers and she may have influenced his writing. Olive Garnett never married, and she published nothing further during her long life. Her extensive diaries, which she kept until just before her death in 1958, are a major resource. Two volumes covering the 1890s have been published as Tea and Anarchy! (1989) and Olive and Stepniak (1993).

Key Sources:

The Bloomsbury Diary of Olive Garnett 1890-1893, ed. B. Johnson, Bartlett’s Press, 1989

An English Context for Conrad’s Russian Characters: Sergey Stepniak and the Diary of Olive Garnett by Thomas C. Moser in ‘Journal of Modern Literature’, Vol. 11, No. 1 (March 1984) pp. 3-44.

Eleanor Fitzsimons is the author of The Life and Loves of E. Nesbit

(Duckworth, 2019). Her previous book is Wilde’s Women: how Oscar Wilde was shaped by the women he knew (Duckworth, 2015). She is an Honorary Patron of the Oscar Wilde Society and is on the editorial board of The Wildean.   https://eafitzsimons.wordpress.com

See also: E. Nesbit – Pascal Theatre Company (pascal-theatre.com)