Biographer
Neither of her first two books had brought her fame or fortune and she became only well known 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".
After the death of D. H. Lawrence she immediately started working on his biography which was published in 1932 as The Savage Pilgrimage. This was regarded as libellous by John Middleton Murry who tried to suppress the book and insisted on changes and deletions. The original edition was republished in 1981 by Cambridge University Press.
Read more about this topic: Catherine Carswell
Famous quotes containing the word biographer:
“Biography, in its purer form, confined to the ended lives of the true and brave, may be held the fairest meed of human virtue—one given and received in entire disinterestedness—since neither can the biographer hope for acknowledgment from the subject, not the subject at all avail himself of the biographical distinction conferred.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)
“It is in this impossibility of attaining to a synthesis of the inner life and the outward that the inferiority of the biographer to the novelist lies. The biographer quite clearly sees Peel, say, seated on his bench while his opponents overwhelm him with perhaps undeserved censure. He sees him motionless, miserable, his head bent on his breast. He asks himself: “What is he thinking?” and he knows nothing.”
—Andre Maurois (1885–1967)
“The first thing to be done by a biographer in estimating character is to examine the stubs of his victim’s cheque-books.”
—Silas Weir Mitchell (1829–1914)