Catherine Carswell

Catherine Carswell (March 27, 1879 - March 19, 1946) was a scottish novelist, biographer and journalist who was one of the few female writers of the Modern Scottish Renaissance. Unlike her controversial biography of Scotlands literary hero Robert Burns her earlier work, two novels set in Edwardian Glasgow, lived in the shadows until its republication by feminist publishing house Virago in the seventies. Her work is now considered an integral part of scottish woman writing of the early 20th century.

Carswell was born in Glasgow, the second of the four children of George and Mary Anne Macfarlande, God-fearing Free Church middle-class Glaswegians. After attending the New Park school for girls she spent two years of musical studies at the Frankfurt Conservatorium only to come back realizing that her future was in the arts. In 1901 she enrolled for English Literature Classes at the University of Glasgow. Among her professors were Walter Raleigh and Adolphus A. Jack. Although considered a star pupil she could not, as a woman, be admitted to a degree.

In September 1904 she met her first husband Herbert Jackson, a Boer War Veteran and slightly paranoid artist. She married him after a "whirlwind courtship" only a month later. Thinking that he was impotent he accused Carswell of betraying him upon the news of her pregnancy and threatened to kill her in March 1905. He was taken to a mental institution where he remained for the rest of his life, considered too dangerous to be discharged. He never met his daughter Diana who was born the following October.

Working as a critic for the Glasgow Herald she entered into a lengthy affair with the artist Maurice Greiffenhagen who then was at the heights of his fame and went on to be an academian, her elder by seventeen years he was married and with a family. It was also around that time that she began to establish her numerous literary connections and became a close friend of D. H. Lawrence.

In 1908 she made legal history when her marriage with Herbert Jackson was divorced after she could prove that his mental illness had started prior to their engagement and he was not aware of what he was doing when he married her.

Her daughter Diana died of pneumonia in 1913 two years after they had moved to London. Around that time she started working on her first novel Open the Door! and became engaged to Donald Carswell, an old acquaintance from Glasgow University and the Glasgow Herald, whom she married early in 1915. Their son John was born in the following autumn.

The same year she lost her job after a favourable review of Lawrence's The Rainbow but continued in journalism as assistant dramatic critic for the Observer. During the autumn of 1916 she had nearly finished the work on her novel and she exchanged lengthy letters about it with Lawrence who in return asked her for advice with his newest novel Women in Love.

Her first novel Open the Door! was finally published in 1920 and won the Melrose Prize. Although by no means autobiographical the story of a Glaswegian girl called Joanna, resembles in many ways her own life and represents her search for independence.

Only two years later she published her second and last novel, The Camomille, another portrait of a woman living in the Second City of the Empire at the turn of the century. Neither of her first two books had brought her fame or fortune and she became only well known after finishing a controversial biography of Scotland's national poet Robert Burns in 1930. Orthodox Burns-fans dismissed this frank, demystifying account of the poet's life, the Burns club attacked her with sermons in Glasgow Cathedral and someone sent her a bullet accompanied by a letter asking her to "make the world a cleaner place".

After the death of D. H. Lawrence she immeadiately started working on his biography which was published in 1932 as The Savage Pilgrimage. In the 1930s there followed three anthologies, journalistic reviews and a third biography The Tranquil Heart about the italian writer Boccaccio (1937).

In 1940 her husband Donald was killed in a street accident during the blackout. She continued to live along in London where she worked on a two-volume biography of John Buchan toghether with his widow Lady Teedsmuir. Volume 1: The Clearing House was published in 1946 and Volume two John Buchan by His Wife and Friends in 1947.

Catherine Carswell died in March 1946, aged 67. Her son John edited her fragmentary autobiographical texts and published it in 1950 under the title Lying awake: An unfinished autobiography.