At 18, she began working as a
secretary, while also writing. Her
Charades For Home Acting (44 pp.) was published by Woodford Fawcett and Co. in 1888.
Sappho, an
epic poem 210 pages long, was published by
Kegan Paul, Trench and Co. in 1889, at her own expense. She followed with
Idylls of Womanhood, a collection of poetry published by
William Heinemann in 1892. At the age of 33, she married a medical doctor named Horatio Francis Ninian Scott. They lived in
Hanover Square, London, where their first child, Marjorie Catharine Waiora Scott, was born in 1899; they also had a son, Horatio Christopher L. Scott, born in March 1901. Then the family moved to
West Cowes on the
Isle of Wight in the summer of 1902, where they lived for the next seven years. Another child, Edward Walter Lucas Scott, nicknamed Toby, was born in June 1904. Catherine Dawson Scott, freed from daily household duties after the birth of the third child, found country life stifling and missed the literary culture of London. She resumed writing and in 1906, at age 41, published her first novel,
The Story of Anna Beames under the pen name "Mrs. Sappho". Two years later she published her second novel,
The Burden, under the name C.A. Dawson Scott. She produced seven more books in six years until the outbreak of
World War I in 1914, including in 1909
Treasure Trove (1909),
The Agony Column (1909), and
Madcap Jane (1910). In 1910, the Scott family moved back closer to London, enabling Dawson Scott to join London's literary circle. Dawson Scott continued to write and publish works, including
Mrs Noakes, An Ordinary Woman (1911) and a guide (with map) titled
Nooks And Corners of Cornwall (1911). In 1912, Dawson Scott met poet
Charlotte Mary Mew, who has reportedly read
Macdap Jane. At that time, Dawson Scott was also engaged in, or had just finished, editing the poems of her deceased cousin,
Henry Dawson Lowry, and writing her own poems. At the start of World War I broke out, her husband entered the
Royal Army Medical Corps and was sent to
France In effect, thousands of women were sent to perform land work, exploited as casual, volunteer labour. When C. A. Dawson Scott and Dr. Scott returned from their military placements, they found it impossible to resume their relationship as before, after the traumatic (and alternately empowering, for Dawson Scott) experience of the war. Eventually, after 20 years of marriage, they divorced. Dr. Scott died by
suicide in 1922. In the spring of 1917, Dawson Scott founded the To-Morrow Club, which aimed to draw the "writers of tomorrow", i.e. the "literary youth", and connect them with established writers to exchange ideas, advice, and comments. Dawson Scott would sometimes invite the literary agents and editors she knew to attend Club dinners, while encouraging the young writers to meet them. The dinner meetings-cum-lectures soon became a weekly event. At the same time, Dawson Scott continued writing; she published the novel
Wastralls in 1918, with which she resumed a prolific pattern of publishing a book nearly every year. Catherine A. Dawson Scott remains best known founding in 1921 of the
P.E.N. Club, a successor to the To-Morrow Club, and the founding centre of
PEN International, a worldwide association of writers. The PEN Club dedicated itself to fostering a community of writers who would defend the role of literature in an ever-evolving society. PEN was a shortened acronym for Poets, Playwrights, Editors, Essayists and Novelists, and though it was intended as apolitical, both its membership and leadership has been
left-leaning. In addition to her organizing activities and original writing, Dawson adapted her 1921 novel
The Haunting, in conjunction with some of her cousin
Henry Dawson Lowry's writing, into the
libretto for the opera
Gale by
Ethel Leginska. The opera premiered in
Chicago at the
Civic Opera House, with
John Charles Thomas in the lead, on 23 November 1935. ==Psychical research==