Catherine Carswell
Catherine Carswell was a Scottish writer and biographer, born Catherine Macfarlane in 1879 in Glasgow. Coming from a deeply religious family with a background in the textile industry, she defied her upbringing by embracing socialism in her teenage years. Educated at the Schumann Conservatoire in Germany and the Glasgow School of Art, she struggled against the limitations placed on women in academia at the time. Her personal life was marked by tragedy, including the loss of her daughter and the dissolution of her first marriage due to her husband’s mental illness.
Carswell found her literary voice in the early 20th century, with her first novel, *Open the Door!* published in 1920, drawing heavily from her own experiences. She also produced notable biographies, including *Life of Robert Burns* and *The Savage Pilgrimage*, which reflected her unique perspective and often challenged conventional narratives. Despite facing initial backlash for her work, her contributions to literature have gained recognition over the years, particularly for their early feminist themes. Carswell's work has since been revived, highlighting her significance in the literary canon as an influential figure and writer.
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Subject Terms
Catherine Carswell
Author
- Born: March 27, 1879
- Birthplace: Glasgow, Scotland
- Died: March 19, 1946
- Place of death: Oxford, Oxfordshire, England
Biography
Catherine Macfarlane was born in Glasgow, Scotland, in 1879. Both her grandfathers had been Church of Scotland ministers, and her parental home was also deeply religious. Her father, George Gray Macfarlane, worked in the textile industry; her mother was Mary Anne Elizabeth Lewis. She was educated at Park School, Glasgow. She had always been a daredevil child, and at fourteen, decided to become a socialist, rejecting her parents’ religion and politics. From 1899 to 1901, she attended the Schumann Conservatoire in Frankfurt, Germany, to study piano, then returned to Glasgow to study at the Glasgow School of Art, also taking English Literature classes at Glasgow University, even though women were not allowed to graduate there at the time. Here she met Donald Carswell, collaborating with him on the University newspaper.
In 1904, she married Herbert Jackson, the brother-in-law of one of the English professors, Walyter Raleigh. They had one daughter, who died at eight years old. Her husband became insane and the marriage was dissolved, after a groundbreaking court case, in 1912. During this time, she was a reviewer for the Glasgow Herald, and also had an affair with the painter Maurice Greiffenhagen. She also moved to London in 1912, where she came into contact with D. H. Lawrence. When she reviewed his novels favorably, she lost her job with the Herald. She also met up again with Donald Carswell and married him in 1915. The couple earned a precarious living in journalism. They had one son.
Her first novel was Open the Door! (1920). Lawrence encouraged Macfarlane; The two had exchanged manuscripts as early as 1916. The book certainly bears Lawrence’s influence, and is strongly autobiographical. Its heroine, Joanna Bannerman, comes from Glasgow. It deals with her growing independence and awareness of her sexuality. A second novel followed in 1922, The Camomile: An Invention, written in letter form. Its heroine, like Carswell, had studied music but felt drawn to writing, finding such a career difficult in turn-of-the-century Glasgow.
From then on, Carswell turned to biography, when her other journalistic duties gave her time. Her Life of Robert Burns (1930) was a deliberate attempt to desentimentalize the Scots’ hagiographic approach to their national poet. At the time it caused much offence, but has since been recognized as a groundbreaking study of his life. A memoir of D. H. Lawrence followed, The Savage Pilgrimage: A Narrative of D. H. Lawrence (1932), a response to leading critic J.Middleton Murry’s Son of a Woman brought out in 1931. Murry sued, and Carswell had to modify her account. In 1937, she wrote The Tranquil Heart, a biography of the Italian medieval poet Boccaccio. She had become friendly with John Buchan, and after his death helped his wife prepare a series of memoirs, which finally was published in 1947, one year after her own death at Oxford of pleurisy and pneumonia.
Her own autobiographical fragments and papers were edited by her son, and published under the title Lying Awake: An Unfinished Autobiography in 1950. Her writing then became more or less forgotten until 1981, when The Savage Pilgrimage was reissued, followed by the feminist press Virago bringing out her two novels in 1986 and 1987, thus recognizing her importance as an early feminist writer. Her Life of Robert Burns was reissued in 2001. Only at the present time, however, have her reviews and pieces of literary criticism been edited and published.