The Camomile

Literature & Fiction

Carswell, Catherine

Literary

Penguin??Books

The Savage Pilgrimage: A Narrative of D. H. Lawrence

Catherine Carswell (1879-1945), the novelist and biographer of Burns, was also a regular reviewer of new fiction in her early career. She became convinced that D. H. Lawrence was a great writer when she reviewed his first books, made his acquaintance, and became a lifelong and faithful friend. When John Middleton Murry's Son of Woman appeared shortly after Lawrence's death, Catherine Carswell was stung by its assumption that Murry understood Lawrence's 'case' and had explained it in his book. The Savage Pilgrimage was written partly in reply to Murry. Since it took angry exception to his criticisms, Murry thought it libellous, took legal action, and had it first suppressed, and then expurgated. This is a reprint of the original edition of 1932. The book survives the controversy with Murry: it was the first substantial biography of Lawrence, written by a close friend from direct knowledge, full of first-hand information, very sympathetic and understanding.

Biographies & Memoirs

Cambridge University Press

Arts & Literature

Open The Door: A Novel (1920)

Contemporary

Kessinger Publishing

The Camomile: An Invention (British Library Women Writers)

Classics

British Library Publishing

The Camomile: An Invention (Virago Modern Classics)

Time Warner Books Uk

First published in 1930 to an unprecedented storm of protest, Catherine Carswell's The Life of Robert Burns remains the standard work on its subject.
Carswell deliberately shakes the image of Burns as a romantic hero - exposing the sexual misdemeanours, drinking bouts and waywardness that other, more reverential, biographies choose to overlook.
Catherine Carswell's real achievement is to bring alive the personality of a great man: passionate, hard-living, generous, melancholic, morbid and triumphant . . . the very archetype of the supreme creative artist.

The Life Of Robert Burns (Canongate Classics)

Canongate Classics

Joanna Bannerman, capricious, selfish, and warm-hearted, passionately seeks life and "loveliness". The bustling streets of Glasgow at the turn of the century promise much greater excitement than the solid evangelical background she has known hitherto. First published in 1920, this novel powerfully evokes the image of a young woman ensnared yet ultimately released by her capacity for emotion. It contains a strong autobiographical element and is also a powerful evocation of the life and industry of the Second City of the Empire.

Open the Door (Canongate Classics)

British & Irish

Canongate UK

As a fine novelist, critic, and biographer Catherine Carswell led a passionate and various life, full of intellectual commitment and a wide range of social interests. She worked on this original, modest, and yet richly remarkable autobiography over a number of years, coming back to it again and again, almost as an act of meditation. The younger daughter of a Glasgow shipping merchant, Catherine Macfarlane studied music in Frankfurt before returning to Glasgow and then moving to London where she worked as a literary and dramatic reviewer and met her second husband, Donald Carswell, and a wide circle of literary and cultural figures, including a succession of Soviet ambassadors, Lady Tweedsmuir, and D.H. Lawrence. In fact she became one of Lawrence's close friends, and it was he who encouraged her to write her first novel, Open the Door!, based on her own background and a sense of growing social and spiritual independence. Carswell’s interests and enthusiasms encompassed (among others) Herzen, Dickens, T.S. Eliot, Rabelais, Burns, and Boccaccio, but Lying Awake is the distillation of her thoughts on her own life and indeed on the nature of identity and autobiography itself. Left unfinished when she died in 1946, the manuscript was edited by her son John and has not been reprinted since it was first published in 1950. Edited and introduced by John Carswell.

Lying Awake (Canongate Classics)

Open the Door!

Memoirs

Little, Brown & Company (UK)

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Books by Carswell, Catherine