Add clairvoyance to Mansfield’s talents. Over time, Garnett’s detractors would make her out to be a prim and proper smotherer of the wild (male) Russian soul. Nabokov described her translations of Gogol as “always unbearably demure.” The Soviet writer Kornei Chukovsky complained that she dulled Dostoyevsky’s “convulsions of syntax,” reproducing “no volcano, but, rather, a flat lawn mowed in the English style.”

It’s true that Garnett could be strait-laced. When she first met Stepniak, she was aghast at one thing above all else. “To my horror,” she wrote in an unpublished memoir, “I found that he habitually carried books out of the British Museum reading room at the lunch-hour, and I could not make him feel it was a crime, since, as he said, he always took them back.” Yet the image of Garnett as a buttoned-up Victorian bookworm hides, much like a corset, her true shape. A socialist, Garnett understood her role as a translator to be revolutionary in the most literal sense: as an act of infiltration, a way of sneaking subversive information across borders.

The English, fresh from the Crimean War, saw Russia as the land of the czars, home to an autocratic regime and uncouth brutes obedient to it. Literature, Stepniak believed, could unveil a Russia full of doubters and dissenters, a nation of many voices, not all speaking the same language. In Garnett, he found a translator who could remain faithful to both the words on the page and the world he wanted to build beyond them.

Garnett was born Constance Black, to a middle-class family in Brighton in 1861, the same year that Alexander II abolished serfdom, putting her on something of a crash course with translation history; in 1895, she would translate a “A Sportsman’s Sketches” (1852), Ivan Turgenev’s searing fictional portrait of Russian peasants living in bondage. In Russia, the abolition of serfdom was part of a series of reforms meant to stave off revolution. But the country’s radical youth were not satisfied with mere reform: They were anarchists and socialists, and they were organized and armed. In 1878, 19-year-old Vera Zasulich shot the governor of St. Petersburg in a case that shocked Europe. Stepniak wrote a profile of Zasulich for his book “Underground Russia” (1882), a study of the country’s new revolutionaries. In England, “Underground Russia” was a smash hit, going through three printings the year it was translated. The whole nation was fascinated by these dynamite-happy young radicals and the land they hailed from.

Garnett arrived in London in 1884; her sister Clementina already mingled in leftist circles (she was friends with Eleanor Marx, Karl’s youngest daughter). Like many of her generation, Garnett frequented radical social clubs, including the Fabian Society and William Morris’s socialist league. She took a job as a librarian in London’s poor East End — not far from where thousands of Russian-Jewish immigrants had settled after fleeing pogroms — embarking, she reflected later, on a “new interesting life that seemed intensely romantic.” Soon she met Edward Garnett, an aspiring literary critic and editor. Edward was more skeptical than his girlfriend when it came to revolutionary politics. In a 1991 biography of Constance, Richard Garnett, the pair’s grandson, writes that “the young lovers had a row about Land Nationalization.”