Catherine Carswell

Catherine Roxburgh Carswell (née Macfarlane; 27 March 1879 – 18 February 1946) was a Scottish author, biographer and journalist, now known as one of the few women to take part in the Scottish Renaissance. Her biography of the Scottish poet Robert Burns aroused controversy, but two earlier novels of hers, set in Edwardian Glasgow, were little noticed until their republication by the feminist publishing house Virago in 1987. Her work is now seen as integral to Scottish women's writing of the early 20th century.

Early life

Catherine Macfarlane was born in Glasgow, the second of four children of George and Mary Anne Macfarlane (née Lewis), middle-class Free Church Glaswegians. She attended the city's new Park School for Girls and grew up in Garnethill,

Critic and writer

Working as a critic for the Glasgow Herald, Macfarlane began a relationship with the artist Maurice Greiffenhagen, who then was at the height of his fame and went on to be an academician. He was her elder by 17 years, married and with a family. Around this time she began to establish numerous literary connections. She later became a close friend of D. H. Lawrence. Two years later she published her second and last novel, The Camomile, another portrait of a woman living in Glasgow at the turn of the century.

Biographer

Neither of her first two books brought her fame or fortune. She became well known only 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." Murry's threats to sue for libel resulted in the publisher, Chatto and Windus, withdrawing unsold copies of the first edition from the market and making changes and deletions that affected subsequent printings until, long after Murry's death in 1957, the original text was republished in 1981 by Cambridge University Press.

Later life

In the 1930s there followed three anthologies, some journalistic reviews, and a third biography, The Tranquil Heart (1937), about the Italian Renaissance author and poet Giovanni Boccaccio. In 1936 came a publication dedicated to Lord Tweedsmuir (John Buchan), written in collaboration with her husband Donald and illustrator Evelyn Dunbar (later commissioned as one of the few female official British WW2 artists): The Scots Week-End and Caledonian Vade-Mecum for Host, Guest and Wayfarer (George Routledge & Sons Ltd).

In 1940 her husband Donald was killed in a street accident during the blackout. She continued to live alone in London, working on a two-volume biography of John Buchan together with his widow, Lady Tweedsmuir. Volume 1, The Clearing House, appeared in 1946 and Volume 2, John Buchan by His Wife and Friends, in 1947.

Catherine Carswell died of pleurisy after pneumonia on 18 February 1946, aged 66, at the Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford. Her son John edited her fragmentary autobiographical texts and published them in 1950 as Lying Awake: An Unfinished Autobiography.

In fiction

Carswell's marriage to Herbert Jackson is the subject of the novel, What We Did in the Dark, by Ajay Close.

Bibliography

Cathe Giffuni, Jan Pilditch and Carol Anderson: Opening the Doors: The Achievement of Catherine Carswell. Carol Anderson, ed. Edinburgh: Ramsey Head Press, 2001
Selected Letters of Catherine Carswell, edited and introduced by Jan Pilditch. Kennedy & Boyd, Edinburgh, 2016
Catherine Carswell's War: Letters 1939–1946. Selected and Introduced by Jan Pilditch. Kennedy & Boyd, Edinburgh, 2016

Novels

Open the Door! 1920
The Camomile 1922

Biographies

The Life of Robert Burns 1930 (reissued by Canongate)
The Savage Pilgrimage 1932 (a life of D. H. Lawrence)
The Tranquil Heart 1937 (a biography of the 14th-century Italian writer Giovanni Boccaccio)

Autobiography

Lying Awake 1950 (an unfinished autobiography that includes some correspondence, with an introduction by her son, John Carswell)

References

External links

Textualities: Catherine Carswell at textualities.net