Catherine Carswell - Critic and Writer

Critic and Writer

Working as a critic for the Glasgow Herald she entered into a lengthy affair with the artist Maurice Greiffenhagen who then was at the heights of his fame and went on to be an academician, her elder by seventeen years. He was married and with a family. It was also around this time that she began to establish her numerous literary connections and later became a close friend of D. H. Lawrence.

Her daughter Diana died of pneumonia in 1913 two years after they had moved to London. Around that time she started working on her first novel Open the Door! and became engaged to Donald Carswell, an old acquaintance from Glasgow University and the Glasgow Herald, whom she married early in 1915. Their son John was born in the following autumn.

The same year she lost her job after a favourable review of Lawrence's The Rainbow, but continued in journalism as assistant drama critic for the Observer. During the autumn of 1916 she had nearly finished the work on her novel and she exchanged lengthy letters about it with Lawrence, who in return asked her for advice with his newest novel, Women in Love.

Her first novel Open the Door! was finally published in 1920 and won the 250-guinea Andrew Melrose Prize. Although by no means autobiographical, the story of a Glaswegian girl called Joanna, resembles in many ways her own life and represents her search for independence. Melrose, who selected the book personally, recorded the "profound impression" it made on him.

Only two years later she published her second and last novel, The Camomile, another portrait of a woman living in the Second City of the Empire at the turn of the century.