As a child, he had a cloak made of rabbit skin and thus received the nickname "Bunny", by which he was known to friends and intimates all his life.

[2] In 1905, Garnett’s mother moved into a rented flat in Hampstead, from where he began to attend University College School in Gower Street, London, travelling there daily by horse-drawn tram.

[2] In his time between school and university, Garnett befriended Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, then in Brixton Prison, and devised an unsuccessful attempt to spring him from the gaol.

[2] As a conscientious objector in the First World War, Garnett worked on fruit farms in Suffolk and Sussex with his lover Duncan Grant.

[3] A prominent member of the Bloomsbury Group, Garnett received literary recognition when his novel Lady into Fox, an allegorical fantasy,[4] was awarded the 1922 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction.

Garnett was bisexual, as were several members of the artistic and literary Bloomsbury Group, and he had affairs with Francis Birrell and Duncan Grant.

Henrietta (1945–2019) married Lytton Burgo Partridge, the nephew of her father's first wife Ray, but was left a widow with a newborn infant when she was 18;[10] she oversaw the legacies of both David Garnett and Duncan Grant.

After his separation from Angelica, Garnett moved to France and lived in the grounds at the Château de Charry, Montcuq (near Cahors), in a house leased to him by the owners, Jo and Angela d'Urville.