Catherine Roxburgh Carswell

Background

Catherine Fitzgerald was born on March 27, 1879 to parents who encouraged artistic expression. She was the second of four children of George and Mary Anne Macfarlane, God-fearing middle-class Free Church Glaswegians.

Education

Catherine was educated at the New Park School for Girls, before spending two years studying music at the Frankfurt Conservatorium. After returning to Scotland she attended Glasgow University, where she studied English literature.

Career

Catherine made her living working as a critic on the Glasgow Herald, meanwhile developing a wide range of literary connections.

It was in 1915 that Catherine lost her job on the Glasgow Herald after writing a favourable review of D.H. Lawrence's "The Rainbow" against the wishes of the editor. She went to work instead for the Observer. Her own first novel, "Open the Door!" was published in 1920 and had autobiographical overtones, being about a young woman making her way in Glasgow. Her second - and last - novel, "The Camomile", was published two years later.

It was when she moved into biography that Catherine Carswell began to make her name. In 1930 she published her "Life of Robert Burns", a book based almost entirely on original source material and owing nothing to the almost saintly image painted of him by most other writers at the time. The result was outrage and uproar as Burns' many fans were confronted with a much more accurate portrait of their hero that revealed his many blemishes as well as his finer qualities. Almost as controversial was her biography of D.H. Lawrence, published in 1932. Her subsequent works on Giovanni Boccaccio and John Buchan were considered more mainstream at the time.

Catherine Carswell lived and worked in London until her death in 1946 at the age of 67.

Achievements

• Catherine Carswell is best known for her passionate, partisan biographies of writers, in which she warmly sympathizes with the difficulties besetting the creative individual.

Works

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• book

  • The Savage Pilgrimage: A Narrative of D.H. Lawrence

    (A man who prepared for death as carefully as he did for l...)

  • Open The Door!

    (Joanna Bannerman, capricious, selfish and warm-hearted, p...)

  • Camomile
  • The Life Of Robert Burns
  • Lying Awake
  • Open the Door!
  • Lying Awake
  • The Camomile: An Invention
  • Catherine Carswell's War: Letters 1939-1946
  • The Life of Robert Burns
  • Robert Burns

Personality

Catherine was herself a creative person, occasionally stymied by the harsh or indifferent critics in her path.

Connections

In September 1904, Catherine Fitzgerald met her first husband, Herbert Jackson, a Second Boer War veteran and artist. She married him after a "whirlwind courtship" only a month later. From him she had a daughter Diana, who was born the following October and died in 1913.

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

She married early in 1915 to Donald Carswell. Their son John was born in the following autumn.

Father:

George Macfarlane

Mother:

Mary Anne Macfarlane

Spouse:

Herbert Jackson

He was suffered from paranoid delusions. Thinking that he was sterile, he accused Carswell of betraying him when he heard 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, being considered too dangerous to be released. He never met his daughter.

Spouse:

Donald Carswell

In 1940 Donald Carswell was killed in a traffic accident caused by the blackout during London's blitz.

Daughter:

Diana

Son:

John Carswell

In 1950, he published his mother collected autobiographical notes as "Lying Awake: An unfinished autobiography."

Friend:

David Herbert Lawrence

References

• Contemporary Authors New Revision: A Bio-Bibliographical Guide to Current Writers in Fiction, General Nonfiction, Poetry, Journalism, Drama, Motion Pictures, Television, and Other Fields: 178
• Catherine Carswell: A Biography "Her Life" of Robert Burns produced a furore in Scottish newspapers for its depiction of a man, rather than a legend, and her biography of D. H. Lawrence, "The Savage Pilgrimage", was withdrawn amid threats of legal action. As a working journalist, she knew many of the great literary figures of her day in Scotland, England, and America. She worked with the Irishman William Fay to write a history of the Abbey Theatre, and was the lifelong friend of the novelist D. H. Lawrence, remaining his supporter throughout his battles with British censorship. As an Edwardian, Catherine Carswell was heir to Glasgow's nineteenth century - its godliness, its realism, its modernity, and its sentimentality. As a well travelled twentieth-century woman, who lived in London from 1910, she visited Italy, Germany, France, and met most of Stalin's cabinet in pre-war Russia. She was rebellious, determined, intellectual, and no stranger to conflict. Jan Pilditch's vivid account of her life tells us much about women and their writing in the early years of the twentieth century.