Scottish Authors > Catherine Carswell Novelist & Biographer 1879-1946

Carswell was born Catherine Roxburgh Macfarlane in Glasgow on 27th March 1879. She was educated there, reading English at Glasgow University, and spent two years studying music in Frankfurt. She married in 1904, but the marriage was annulled on the grounds of her husband's severe mental illness, and she embarked on a long relationship with the painter Maurice Greiffenhagen. Already a reviewer for the Glasgow herald, she moved to London in 1912, and in 1915 married a fellow journalist, Donald Carswell.

Meanwhile she had become friendly with DH Lawrence, and lost her post on the Glasgow herald when she reviewed his novel The Rainbow against the editor's wishes. Lawrence encouraged her in the writing of her first novel Open the door! (1920). His influence, along with a strong autobiographical element, can be seen in the novel, but Open the door! is particularly notable for its frank treatment, unusual in women's writing of the time, of developing independence and sexuality in its heroine Joanna Bannerman:

"Wave after wave of purely physical recollections swept through her; but at the same time in her brain a cool spectator seemed to be sitting aloof and in judgement. This then was marriage! This droll device, this astonishing grotesque experience was what the poets had sung since the beginning. To this all her quivering dreams had led, all Mario's wooing touches and his glances of fire!"

The central character of her second novel, The Camomile (1922), has, like Carswell herself, studied music, but now feels herself drawn to writing. In her milieu of turn-of-the-century Glasgow this is not seen as a "womanly" occupation, and the novel is a serious examination, though in readable epistolary form, of the particular problems and dilemmas faced by a woman writer.

The Carswells were now both attempting to live by freelance writing, and Catherine's work - reviewing, criticism and editing - provided a major part of the family income. She wrote no more novels, but, in what time could be spared from journalism, produced her groundbreaking Life of Robert Burns (1930). Returning to original sources and avoiding the near-idolatrous view of Burns then current, the biography met with much criticism from Burnsians, but is now well regarded for its perception and style, and has recently been reissued. Two other biographies followed: The Savage pilgrimage (1932), a memoir of DH Lawrence (which also ran into trouble on publication, encountering objections from another Lawrence biographer), and The Tranquil heart (1937), a biography of the fourteenth-century Italian writer Boccaccio, whom she also admired.

Catherine Carswell died on 19th March 1946. Her fragmentary papers and autobiographical writings were edited by her son and published as Lying awake: an unfinished autobiography (1950). Forgotten or undervalued for some thirty years, her work was rediscovered in the 1980s, when Virago reissued Open the Door! and The Camomile, and she is now recognised as an important figure in Scottish women's writing. A first volume of criticism, Essays on Catherine Carswell, edited by Carol Anderson, is forthcoming from Ramsay Head Press.

Moira Burgess

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