Catherine Carswell (1879-1946) was born in Glasgow, one of the four children of George and Mary Anne Madarlane. On leaving school she attended classes in English literature at Glasgow University, but could not in those days be admitted for a degree. In 1904, after a brief engagement, she married Herbert Jackson. When, in 1905, she told him of her pregnancy, he tried to kill her. Declared insane, he spent the rest of his life in a mental hospital. Catherine returned to Glasgow where her daughter was born and worked, first in Glasgow and then in London, as dramatic and literary critic, for the Glasgow Herald. In 1907 she began legal proceedings for the anulrnent of her marriage. She won the case, making legal history.

Her friendship with D. H. Lawrence was kindled by her favourable review of The white Peacock (1911). They met in 1914 and their relationship lasted until Lawrence’s death. In 1915 she married Donald Carswell, with whom she had one son, and in the same year she lost her job at the Glasgow Herald for praising The Rainbow. Soon after this the Carswells moved briefly from London to Bournemouth. She became an assistant dramatic critic at the Obsewerand continued working on the novel which would become Open the Door! In 1916 she and Lawrence exchanged manuscripts of Open the Door! and Women in Love. Her novel was completed in 1918 and won the Melrose Prize on publication in 1920. Her only other novel, The Camomile, was published two years later and she then devoted herself to The Life of Robert Burns which made her name in 1930. This was quickly followed by a biography of Lawrence, The Savage Pilgrimage (1932), a number of anthologies and a life of Boccoccio, The Tranquil Heart (1937).

After her husband’s death during the black-out in 1940, Catherine Carswell lived alone in London. She worked with John Buchan’s widow on his memorial anthology, The Clearing House (1946) and on her own autobiography which was published, incomplete, as Lying Awake in 1950. Her fiends included Vita Sackville-West, Edwin Muir, Rose Macaulay, Storm Jameson, Hugh Macdiarmid, John Buchan and Aldous Huxley. Catherine Carswell died in Oxford at the age of sixty-six.

Copyright

First published as a Canongate Classic in 1996
by Canongate Books Ltd,
14 High Street, Edinburgh, EH1 1TE

This digital edition first published in 2009
by Canongate Books Ltd

Copyright © Catherine Carswell, 1920
Introduction copyright © John Carswell, 1996

The publishers gratefully acknowledge general subsidy from the Scottish Arts Council towards the Canongate Classics series and a specific grant towards the publication of this title

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 84767 508 8