[4] From 1906, her favourite amanuensis was a young Russian woman, Natalie Duddington whom she had met in Russia and in whom she found "real intellectual companionship".

[5] Over the next four decades, Garnett produced English-language versions of dozens of volumes by Tolstoy, Gogol, Goncharov, Dostoyevsky, Turgenev, Ostrovsky, Herzen and Chekhov.

Her son and only child, David Garnett, trained as a biologist and later wrote novels, including the popular Lady into Fox (1922).

Of the thing itself [i.e. Anna Karenina] I think but little, so that her merit shines with the greater luster", Nabokov wrote "I shall never forgive Conrad this crack.

However, May's study also critiqued Garnett for her tendency of "stylistic homogenizing" that "eras[ed] those idiosyncrasies of narrative voice and dialogue that different authors possessed"[12] and for making prudish word choices that "tamed [the Russian classics] further.

"[13] May also analyzed how for decades, Garnett's translations were unquestioningly acclaimed by critics because "she suited the needs of her time so well, that no one knew what questions to ask.

"[14] Kornei Chukovsky respected Garnett for introducing millions of English readers to Russian literature, and praised her translations of Turgenev, stating that they "fully correspond to the originals in tonality,"[15] but condemned her other translations, writing that she had reduced Dostoevsky's style into "a safe blandscript: not a volcano, but a smooth lawn mowed in the English manner—which is to say a complete distortion of the original"[16] and that the same criticisms applied to her translation of Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich.

But there was no criticism"[17]In 1994 Donald Rayfield compared Garnett's translations with the most recent scholarly versions of Chekhov's stories and concluded: While she makes elementary blunders, her care in unravelling difficult syntactical knots and her research on the right terms for Chekhov's many plants, birds and fish are impressive...

[19][20] For his Norton Critical Edition of The Brothers Karamazov, Ralph Matlaw based his revised version on her translation.

[22] Matlaw published an earlier revision of Garnett's translation of the Grand Inquisitor chapter in a volume paired with Notes from Underground.