Catherine Carswell - Later Life

Later Life

In the 1930s there followed three anthologies, journalistic reviews and a third biography The Tranquil Heart about the Italian Renaissance author and poet Giovanni Boccaccio (1937).

1936 saw the collaborative publication dedicated to Lord Tweedsmuir (John Buchan) with her husband Donald and illustrator Evelyn Dunbar (later commissioned as the only female Official British WW2 artist) of 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 where she worked on a two-volume biography of John Buchan together with his widow Lady Tweedsmuir. Volume 1, The Clearing House, was published in 1946, and Volume 2, John Buchan by His Wife and Friends, in 1947.

Catherine Carswell died of pleurisy following pneumonia 18 February 1946, aged 66, in the Radcliffe Infirmary at Oxford. Her son John edited her fragmentary autobiographical texts, and published it in 1950 under the title Lying Awake: An Unfinished Autobiography.