Lying Awake
Catherine Carswell
Available as eBook
Edited and introduced by John Carswell
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. Laurence. In fact she became one of Laurence’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.
Catherine Carswell
Catherine Carswell (1879-1946) was born in Glasgow, one of the four children of George and Mary Anne Macfarlane. On leaving school she attended courses 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 anulment 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 1930. In 1915 she married Donald Carswell, with whom she had one son. In the same year, she lost her job at the Glasgow Herald for praising The Rainbow. Soon after that the Carswells moved briefly from London to Bournemouth. 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 other novel, The Camomile, was published two years later, after which she 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).
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. Carswell died in Oxford at the age of 66.