Catherine Carswell
Catherine Carswell (1879-1946), née Macfarlane, was born into a devoutly evangelical family quite similar to the Bannerman family in Open the Door! (1920). As a child growing up in Glasgow, she learned to take pride in the two Macfarlane grandfathers who had “gone out” during the Great Disruption in 1843 to join the newly formed Free Presbyterian Church. In her family home, Carswell relates in her autobiography, “none of the arts were much regarded” (31). Although her parents were “simple and Philistine”, they encouraged Carswell and her siblings in their educational endeavors and artistic pursuits. Carswell spent two years studying music at the Schumann Conservatory in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, an experience she shared with the protagonist of her second novel, The Camomile (1922).
On her return to Glasgow, Carswell took classes at the Glasgow School of Art and the University of Glasgow, where she studied with Walter Raleigh, a Professor of English. In 1904, after a whirlwind ourtship, she married Raleigh’s brother-in-law Herbert Jackson, who very soon revealed himself to be mentally unstable, threatening the pregnant Catherine with a gun. The marriage was annulled in 1908, but long before that, Catherine had returned to Glasgow with her daughter, Diana. There she began an affair with the married artist Maurice Greiffenhagen and supported herself by reviewing drama and fiction for the Glasgow Herald until a favorable review of D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow (1915) cost her the job. Lawrence, whom Carswell first met in 1914, would go on to be an important literary mentor, encouraging her through many of revisions of Open the Door! Carswell wrote a biography of Lawrence, The Savage Pilgrimage (1932), after his death.
In 1915, she married Donald Carswell, a journalist whom she had first met at the University of Glasgow. They settled in London and had a son John, who was born five years after Diana’s death from pneumonia. Carswell was acquainted with the leading figures of the Scottish Renaissance, including Hugh MacDiarmid and Edwin and Willa Muir, but she remained on the fringes of the movement, perhaps because she lived at a distance from its epicenter. Carswell’s two novels have been celebrated for their modernist techniques and concerns, but they also share significant continuities with the works of earlier Scottish women writers such as Margaret Oliphant and with her middlebrow contemporaries such as O. Douglas [Anna Buchan]. Many readers consider her best work to be her biography The Life of Robert Burns (1930), which represented the poet as a flawed human rather than idolizing or sentimentalizing him.
Bibliography
Opening the Doors: the Achievement of Catherine Carswell, ed. by Carol Anderson (Edinburgh: Ramsay Head Press, 2001).
Margery Palmer McCulloch, Scottish Modernism and its Contexts, 1918-1959: Literature, National Identity and Cultural Exchange (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009).
Margery Palmer McCulloch, “Testing the Boundaries in Life and Literature: Catherine Carswell and Rebecca West,” in Scottish and International Modernisms: Relationships and Reconfigurations, ed. by Emma Dymock and Margery Palmer McCulloch (Glasgow: Association for Scottish Literary Studies, 2011), pp. 148-160.
Glenda Norquay, “Catherine Carswell: Open the Door!” A History of Scottish Women’s Writing, ed. by Douglas Gifford and Dorothy McMillan (Edinburgh University Press, 1997), pp. 389-99.