Catherine was now committed to a writing career – the more so as Donald’s ambitions at the Bar were quickly disappointed. He was a gentle, scholarly, quite unpractical man, who worked slowly and with infinite care. His two books – one a collection of essays on nineteenth-century Scotsmen, and the other a study of Sir Walter Scott and his circle – broke new ground with their careful research and impeccable writing. They earned respect, but little money. Her small inheritance was soon spent.

Her second novel, The Camomile, which came out in 1922, was much more light-hearted than her first, and more tautly constructed. Two more were planned, one of which was to be shared with Lawrence, who sketched it on lines which later emerged as those of The Plumed Serpent. But what that novel would have been like with the Scottish setting Lawrence projected for it (“The Maclure, who claims to be chief of the clan and has bought the ancestral castle of his native isle … a man of about forty-five, rather small, dark-eyed, full of energy, but has been a good deal knocked about”) has to be left to the imagination. Neither of the collaborators could see how it would end, and it was abandoned.

The difference over who were Lawrence’s friends was the underlying theme of the celebrated dinner party he gave at the Café Royal, at which the world from which he had drawn Women in Love was conspicuous by its absence. Soon afterwards he left England, and Catherine saw him only rarely, though they continued to correspond. Her decision to turn to biography was very much her own, though she was encouraged in her choice of subject by both Donald and Lawrence, and she dedicated the Life of Robert Burns published in 1930, to them jointly.

There had been no life of Scotland’s national poet for many years, and his memory had become institutionalized in a curious mixture of sanctimoniousness and booze. Catherine’s book is in no sense an exercise in iconoclasm but a carefully researched rescue of the real man, and almost every page records her sympathy with what she was discovering about him. It remains today a very sound biography indeed. The book was bitterly denounced by orthodox Burnsites. It was even preached against from the pulpit of Glasgow Cathedral by the Rev. Lauchlan Maclean Watt. Many were shocked that a woman should write the life of Burns. But the book made her name, and brought her many friends, among them John Buchan.