Catherine Carswell

Catherine Macfarlane was born in Glasgow, the second of four children of George and Mary Anne Macfarlane (née Lewis), middle-class Free Church Glaswegians. She attended the city's new Park School for Girls and grew up in Garnethill, In 1901 she enrolled for English literature classes at the University of Glasgow. Among her professors were Walter Raleigh and Adolphus A. Jack. Although seen as a star pupil she could not, as a woman, be awarded a degree. She then studied music for two years at the Frankfurt Hoch Conservatory, a period she drew on when writing The Camomile. She returned to Glasgow intent on a future in the arts. ==First marriage==

In September 1904, Macfarlane met her first husband, Herbert Jackson, a Second Boer War veteran and artist suffering from paranoid delusions. She married him after a "whirlwind courtship" of only a month. ==Critic and writer==

Working as a critic for the Glasgow Herald, Macfarlane began a relationship with the artist Maurice Greiffenhagen, who then was at the height of his fame and went on to be an academician. He was her elder by 17 years, married and with a family. Around this time she began to establish numerous literary connections. She later became a close friend of D. H. Lawrence. Two years later she published her second and last novel, The Camomile, another portrait of a woman living in Glasgow at the turn of the century. ==Biographer==

Neither of her first two books brought her fame or fortune. She became well known only after finishing a controversial biography of Scotland's national poet, Robert Burns, in 1930. Orthodox Burns fans dismissed this frank, demystifying account of the poet's life. The Burns Club attacked her with sermons in Glasgow Cathedral and someone sent her a bullet accompanied by a letter asking her to "make the world a cleaner place." Murry's threats to sue for libel resulted in the publisher, Chatto and Windus, withdrawing unsold copies of the first edition from the market and making changes and deletions that affected subsequent printings until, long after Murry's death in 1957, the original text was republished in 1981 by Cambridge University Press. ==Later life==

In the 1930s there followed three anthologies, some journalistic reviews, and a third biography, The Tranquil Heart (1937), about the Italian Renaissance author and poet Giovanni Boccaccio. In 1936 came a publication dedicated to Lord Tweedsmuir (John Buchan), written in collaboration with her husband Donald and illustrator Evelyn Dunbar (later commissioned as one of the few female official British WW2 artists): The Scots Week-End and Caledonian Vade-Mecum for Host, Guest and Wayfarer (George Routledge & Sons Ltd). In 1940 her husband Donald was killed in a street accident during the blackout. She continued to live alone in London, working on a two-volume biography of John Buchan together with his widow, Lady Tweedsmuir. Volume 1, The Clearing House, appeared in 1946 and Volume 2, John Buchan by His Wife and Friends, in 1947. Catherine Carswell died of pleurisy after pneumonia on 18 February 1946, aged 66, at the Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford. Her son John edited her fragmentary autobiographical texts and published them in 1950 as Lying Awake: An Unfinished Autobiography. ==In fiction==

Carswell's marriage to Herbert Jackson is the subject of the novel, What We Did in the Dark, by Ajay Close. ==Bibliography==