Catherine Carswell
Encyclopedia
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 who took part in the Scottish Renaissance
. Unlike her controversial biography of Scotland
's literary hero Robert Burns
, her earlier work, two novels set in Edwardian
Glasgow
, lived in the shadows until their republication by feminist publishing house Virago
in 1987. Her work is now considered an integral part of Scottish women's writing of the early 20th century.
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 awarded a degree. She then spent two years of musical studies at the Frankfurt
Hoch Conservatory
, a period she drew upon when writing The Camomile. She returned to Glasgow intent on a future in the arts
.
veteran and artist who suffered from paranoid delusions. She married him after a "whirlwind courtship" only a month later. Thinking that he was sterile 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.
In 1908 she made legal history when her marriage with Herbert Jackson was dissolved after she established that his mental illness had started prior to their engagement and he was not aware of what he was doing when he married her.
who then was at the heights of his fame and went on to be an academician, her elder by seventeen years. He was married and with a family. It was also around this time that she began to establish her numerous literary connections and later became a close friend of D. H. Lawrence
.
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 drama 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 250-guinea Andrew 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. Melrose, who selected the book personally, recorded the "profound impression" it made on him.
Only two years later she published her second and last novel, The Camomile, another portrait of a woman living in the Second City of the Empire at the turn of the century.
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 immediately started working on his biography which was published in 1932 as The Savage Pilgrimage. This was regarded as libellous by John Middleton Murry
who tried to suppress the book and insisted on changes and deletions. The original edition was republished in 1981 by Cambridge University Press
.
(1937).
1936 saw the collaborative publication dedicated to Lord Tweedsmuir (John Buchan) with her husband Donald and illustrator Evelyn Dunbar (later commissioned as the only female Official British WW2 artist) of 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 where she worked on a two-volume biography of John Buchan
together with his widow Lady Tweedsmuir. Volume 1, The Clearing House, was published in 1946, and Volume 2, John Buchan by His Wife and Friends, in 1947.
Catherine Carswell died of pleurisy following pneumonia February 18, 1946, aged 66, in the Radcliffe Infirmary at Oxford. Her son John edited her fragmentary autobiographical texts, and published it in 1950 under the title Lying Awake: An Unfinished Autobiography.
Scotland
Scotland is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. Occupying the northern third of the island of Great Britain, it shares a border with England to the south and is bounded by the North Sea to the east, the Atlantic Ocean to the north and west, and the North Channel and Irish Sea to the...
author
Author
An author is broadly defined as "the person who originates or gives existence to anything" and that authorship determines responsibility for what is created. Narrowly defined, an author is the originator of any written work.-Legal significance:...
, biographer and journalist
Journalist
A journalist collects and distributes news and other information. A journalist's work is referred to as journalism.A reporter is a type of journalist who researchs, writes, and reports on information to be presented in mass media, including print media , electronic media , and digital media A...
, now known as one of the few women who took part in the Scottish Renaissance
Scottish Renaissance
The Scottish Renaissance was a mainly literary movement of the early to mid 20th century that can be seen as the Scottish version of modernism. It is sometimes referred to as the Scottish literary renaissance, although its influence went beyond literature into music, visual arts, and politics...
. Unlike her controversial biography of Scotland
Scotland
Scotland is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. Occupying the northern third of the island of Great Britain, it shares a border with England to the south and is bounded by the North Sea to the east, the Atlantic Ocean to the north and west, and the North Channel and Irish Sea to the...
's literary hero Robert Burns
Robert Burns
Robert Burns was a Scottish poet and a lyricist. He is widely regarded as the national poet of Scotland, and is celebrated worldwide...
, her earlier work, two novels set in Edwardian
Edward VII of the United Kingdom
Edward VII was King of the United Kingdom and the British Dominions and Emperor of India from 22 January 1901 until his death in 1910...
Glasgow
Glasgow
Glasgow is the largest city in Scotland and third most populous in the United Kingdom. The city is situated on the River Clyde in the country's west central lowlands...
, lived in the shadows until their republication by feminist publishing house Virago
Virago Press
Virago is a British publishing company founded in 1973 by Carmen Callil to publish books by women writers. Both new works and reissued books by neglected authors have featured on the imprint's list....
in 1987. Her work is now considered an integral part of Scottish women's writing of the early 20th century.
Early life
Carswell was born in Glasgow, the second of the four children of George and Mary Anne Macfarlane, God-fearing middle-class Free Church Glaswegians. She attended the New Park School for Girls in Glasgow.In 1901 she enrolled for English literature
English literature
English literature is the literature written in the English language, including literature composed in English by writers not necessarily from England; for example, Robert Burns was Scottish, James Joyce was Irish, Joseph Conrad was Polish, Dylan Thomas was Welsh, Edgar Allan Poe was American, J....
classes at the University of Glasgow
University of Glasgow
The University of Glasgow is the fourth-oldest university in the English-speaking world and one of Scotland's four ancient universities. Located in Glasgow, the university was founded in 1451 and is presently one of seventeen British higher education institutions ranked amongst the top 100 of the...
. Among her professors were Walter Raleigh
Walter Raleigh (professor)
Professor Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh was an English scholar, poet and author.He was born in London, the fifth child and only son of a local Congregationalist minister...
and Adolphus A. Jack. Although considered a star pupil she could not, as a woman, be awarded a degree. She then spent two years of musical studies at the Frankfurt
Frankfurt
Frankfurt am Main , commonly known simply as Frankfurt, is the largest city in the German state of Hesse and the fifth-largest city in Germany, with a 2010 population of 688,249. The urban area had an estimated population of 2,300,000 in 2010...
Hoch Conservatory
Hoch Conservatory
Dr. Hoch’s Konservatorium - Musikakademie was founded in Frankfurt am Main on September 22, 1878. Through the generosity of Frankfurter Joseph Hoch, who bequeathed the Conservatory one million German gold marks in his testament, a school for music and the arts was established for all age groups. ...
, a period she drew upon when writing The Camomile. She returned to Glasgow intent on a future in the arts
ARts
aRts, which stands for analog Real time synthesizer, is an audio framework that is no longer under development. It is best known for previously being used in KDE to simulate an analog synthesizer....
.
First marriage
In September 1904 she met her first husband Herbert Jackson, a Second Boer WarSecond Boer War
The Second Boer War was fought from 11 October 1899 until 31 May 1902 between the British Empire and the Afrikaans-speaking Dutch settlers of two independent Boer republics, the South African Republic and the Orange Free State...
veteran and artist who suffered from paranoid delusions. She married him after a "whirlwind courtship" only a month later. Thinking that he was sterile 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.
In 1908 she made legal history when her marriage with Herbert Jackson was dissolved after she established that his mental illness had started prior to their engagement and he was not aware of what he was doing when he married her.
Critic and writer
Working as a critic for the Glasgow Herald she entered into a lengthy affair with the artist Maurice GreiffenhagenMaurice Greiffenhagen
Maurice Greiffenhagen was a British painter and Royal Academician. He illustrated books and designed posters as well as painting idyllic landscapes....
who then was at the heights of his fame and went on to be an academician, her elder by seventeen years. He was married and with a family. It was also around this time that she began to establish her numerous literary connections and later became a close friend of D. H. Lawrence
D. H. Lawrence
David Herbert Richards Lawrence was an English novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, literary critic and painter who published as D. H. Lawrence. His collected works represent an extended reflection upon the dehumanising effects of modernity and industrialisation...
.
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
Donald Carswell
Donald Carswell was a Scottish barrister, journalist and author. He married 1915 Catherine Roxburgh Macfarlane in 1915; their only child, a son, was J. P. Carswell .- References :...
, an old acquaintance from Glasgow University and the Glasgow Herald, whom she married early in 1915. Their son John
J. P. Carswell
John Patrick Carswell CB FRSL was an English civil servant and author who served as Secretary of the British Academy from 1978 to 1983. Professionally and as an author, he was known as J. P...
was born in the following autumn.
The same year she lost her job after a favourable review of Lawrence's The Rainbow
The Rainbow
The Rainbow is a 1915 novel by British author D. H. Lawrence. It follows three generations of the Brangwen family living in Nottinghamshire, particularly focusing on the sexual dynamics of, and relations between, the characters....
, but continued in journalism as assistant drama 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
Women in Love
Women in Love is a novel by British author D. H. Lawrence published in 1920. It is a sequel to his earlier novel The Rainbow , and follows the continuing loves and lives of the Brangwen sisters, Gudrun and Ursula. Gudrun Brangwen, an artist, pursues a destructive relationship with Gerald Crich, an...
.
Her first novel Open the Door! was finally published in 1920 and won the 250-guinea Andrew 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. Melrose, who selected the book personally, recorded the "profound impression" it made on him.
Only two years later she published her second and last novel, The Camomile, another portrait of a woman living in the Second City of the Empire at the turn of the century.
Biographer
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 CathedralGlasgow Cathedral
The church commonly known as Glasgow Cathedral is the Church of Scotland High Kirk of Glasgow otherwise known as St. Mungo's Cathedral.The other cathedrals in Glasgow are:* The Catholic Metropolitan Cathedral Church of Saint Andrew...
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 immediately started working on his biography which was published in 1932 as The Savage Pilgrimage. This was regarded as libellous by John Middleton Murry
John Middleton Murry
John Middleton Murry was an English writer. He was prolific, producing more than 60 books and thousands of essays and reviews on literature, social issues, politics, and religion during his lifetime...
who tried to suppress the book and insisted on changes and deletions. The original edition was republished in 1981 by Cambridge University Press
Cambridge University Press
Cambridge University Press is the publishing business of the University of Cambridge. Granted letters patent by Henry VIII in 1534, it is the world's oldest publishing house, and the second largest university press in the world...
.
Later life
In the 1930s there followed three anthologies, journalistic reviews and a third biography The Tranquil Heart about the Italian Renaissance author and poet Giovanni BoccaccioGiovanni Boccaccio
Giovanni Boccaccio was an Italian author and poet, a friend, student, and correspondent of Petrarch, an important Renaissance humanist and the author of a number of notable works including the Decameron, On Famous Women, and his poetry in the Italian vernacular...
(1937).
1936 saw the collaborative publication dedicated to Lord Tweedsmuir (John Buchan) with her husband Donald and illustrator Evelyn Dunbar (later commissioned as the only female Official British WW2 artist) of 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
Blackout (wartime)
A blackout during war, or apprehended war, is the practice of collectively minimizing outdoor light, including upwardly directed light. This was done in the 20th century to prevent crews of enemy aircraft from being able to navigate to their targets simply by sight, for example during the London...
. She continued to live alone in London where she worked on a two-volume biography of John Buchan
John Buchan, 1st Baron Tweedsmuir
John Buchan, 1st Baron Tweedsmuir was a Scottish novelist, historian and Unionist politician who served as Governor General of Canada, the 15th since Canadian Confederation....
together with his widow Lady Tweedsmuir. Volume 1, The Clearing House, was published in 1946, and Volume 2, John Buchan by His Wife and Friends, in 1947.
Catherine Carswell died of pleurisy following pneumonia February 18, 1946, aged 66, in the Radcliffe Infirmary at Oxford. Her son John edited her fragmentary autobiographical texts, and published it in 1950 under the title Lying Awake: An Unfinished Autobiography.
External links
- Textualities: Catherine Carswell at textualities.net