Catherine Carswell (nee MacFarlane) was born in Glasgow in 1879 into a merchant family with a strong evangelical background. Her two novels, set in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Glasgow are strongly autobiographical and evoke the middle class world in which she lived. Catherine studied at both the Conservatory of Music in Frankfurt and at Glasgow University, but, because women were not formally admitted to the University at this time, was never awarded a degree. Her first marriage ended disastrously when she discovered that her husband was insane, and the annulment of the marriage made legal history when Carswell had to prove that he was insane at the time of marriage and unaware of what he was doing.

Catherine then embarked on a long affair with the artist Maurice Greiffenhagen, who appears under the guise of Louis Pender in Open the Door!. She later married fellow journalist Donald Carswell with whom she had a son.

Catherine Carswell worked as a journalist for many years in Glasgow and London and was famously fired from her position at the Glasgow Herald for writing a review of D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow. Lawrence’s friendship and correspondence encouraged Carswell to write her first novel Open the Door! which won the Melrose Prize on its publication in 1920. Another novel, The Camomile, appeared in 1922, but Carswell became much better known in 1930 when her fictional biography, The Life of Robert Burns was published to much outrage. This frank account of the Scots bard met with attack from Burns Clubs and sparked sermons in Glasgow Cathedral as well as a bullet arriving in the post with a letter asking Carswell to make the world a ‘cleaner place’ by killing herself.

Carswell went on to write biographies of D.H. Lawrence and Boccaccio, and to prepare fragments of an autobiography which were published after her death as Lying Awake. Carswell died in England, her home for much of her adult life, in 1946.