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Garnett studied Latin and Greek, worked shortly as a school teacher and then, in 1893, started translating Russian literature, which became her life passion. She translated works by Goncharov, Turgenev, and Leo Tolstoy, whom she met while visiting Moscow in 1892. Constance Garnett translated dozens of thick volumes by Gogol, Dostoevsky, Pushkin, Turgenev, Ostrovsky , and Chekhov.

Her husband, Edward GarnettEdward Garnett ( 1868 1937) was an English writer, critic and a significant and personally generous literary editor, who was instrumental in getting D. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers published. His father Richard Garnett (1835-1906) was a writer and librarian, was a distinguished reader for the publisher Jonathan CapeJonathan Cape has been since 1987 an imprint of Random House. It was originally a London publisher, founded in 1919 as Jonathan Page and Company the name was changed in 1921, and it took over the back list of A. From that point on it was a major force in. Her son David Garnett trained as a biologist and later wrote novels. His most successful was Lady Into Fox .

Constance Garnett's translations of Russian classics have been highly acclaimed, although at present they seem to some critics somewhat outdated and divergent from the original. It is occasionally claimed that she "retold Russian literature in Victorian English".