Novelist, biographer, journalist and critic, Catherine Carswell was born in 1879 in Glasgow, Scotland, and educated at The Park School for Girls. On leaving school, she attended Frankfurt's Hoch Conservatory of Music, before returning to Glasgow to study at Queen Margaret College, the women's wing of Glasgow University. After a difficult marriage she was faced with a rapid, and in those days incurable, deterioration in her husband's mental health, which resulted in his permanent removal to an institution. She fought for and achieved a precedent-making annulment of her marriage in 1908, after which she lived and worked in Hampstead, London, as a single mother until the death of her daughter in 1913. In 1915 she married Donald Carswell and their son, John Patrick, was born in 1918. Donald Carswell, himself a writer, died in 1940, in a car accident on the first night of the London blackout. Catherine Carswell died in March, 1946 - living just long enough to see her son return from the Second World War. The letters, from the first half of the twentieth century, chronicle the life of a writer whose circle included fellow writers, poets, publishers, broadcasters, public figures, family and friends. The focus of the selection on Catherine Carswell's literary output offers many insights into her personality, friendships and beliefs. For the most part, the originals of the letters are scattered across a number of libraries, often within the collections of the recipients. It is hoped that this edition will make them more easily available to those with an interest in this remarkable Scottish writer.
This selection begins in 1939, as war looms, with the writer Catherine Carswell (1879-1946) penning letters to friends and family, filled with a mix of domestic, financial, literary and political news and concerns, and to the BBC about broadcasting projects and proposals. The focus sharpens with the sudden death of her husband, Donald Carswell, on the first night of the London blackout in 1940, and her choice to live an independent life based in London amid her circle of fellow writers, poets, publishers, booksellers, journalists, family and friends. The frequent letters to her son, John Carswell, are a remarkable collection, as are those written to Persis Miller, with whom she had worked to help refugees following the Spanish Civil War. When Miller left London for New York in 1940, she put Catherine in charge of her possessions and her refugees, funding from America those who wished to go to Mexico. Other long-standing friends and correspondents in this period include Florence Marian McNeill, Ivy Litvinov and Bryna Davis. The last letter here is to John, written days before Catherine's death in February 1946 - the news is of looking forward to correcting book proofs, ideas for radio broadcasts, a visit from a neighbour and, ever practical, spring-cleaning. For the most part the originals of the letters are scattered across a number of libraries, often within the collections of other writers' letters. This collection, and the earlier Selected Letters of Catherine Carswell, makes them more easily available to those with an interest in the life - and times - of this remarkable Scottish novelist, biographer, journalist, and critic.
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.
Joanna Bannerman, capricious, selfish and warm-hearted, passionately seeks life and ‘loveliness’. Certainly the bustling streets of Glasgow at the turn of the century promise much greater excitement than the solid evangelical background she has known hitherto. Her studies in the School of Art open up new horizons – of independence and love – and Joanna reaches for them all. First published in 1920, this novel powerfully evokes the image of a young woman ensnared yet ultimately released by her capacity for emotion. It contains a strong autobiographical element and is also a powerful evocation of the life and industry of the Second City of the Empire.
Catherine Carswell (1879-1945), the novelist and biographer of Burns, was also a regular reviewer of new fiction in her early career. She became convinced that D. H. Lawrence was a great writer when she reviewed his first books, made his acquaintance, and became a lifelong and faithful friend. When John Middleton Murry's Son of Woman appeared shortly after Lawrence's death, Catherine Carswell was stung by its assumption that Murry understood Lawrence's 'case' and had explained it in his book. The Savage Pilgrimage was written partly in reply to Murry. Since it took angry exception to his criticisms, Murry thought it libellous, took legal action, and had it first suppressed, and then expurgated. This is a reprint of the original edition of 1932. The book survives the controversy with Murry: it was the first substantial biography of Lawrence, written by a close friend from direct knowledge, full of first-hand information, very sympathetic and understanding.
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Los misterios del deseo femenino. Catherine Millet aborda la vida y obra de D. H. Lawrence. Catherine Millet, autora de la escandalosa La vida sexual de Catherine M., se adentra en la obra de D. H. Lawrence, autor de las en su día escandalosas Mujeres enamoradas y El amante de Lady Chatterley. ¿Por qué Lawrence? Porque el escritor británico exploró como pocos el tema del deseo femenino, cuestionó la moral de su época y fue un literato transgresor. He aquí el nexo de unión con la autora francesa y el porqué de su interés en él y su obra. Millet ha dedicado dos años a leer no solo las novelas de Lawrence sino también su poesía, sus relatos y su epistolario. Y ha analizado las varias biografías escritas sobre el personaje y los testimonios de diversas mujeres que estuvieron relacionadas con él. El estudio en profundidad de todo este material le ha servido para abordar la visión de la sexualidad del escritor, su vida como utopista y nómada, sus exploraciones de lo prohibido, su ideario político y las relaciones amorosas que mantuvo a lo largo de su vida. El resultado es una visión nueva de Lawrence que desmonta viejos tópicos. Pero, al indagar en la vida del británico, Millet acaba hablando también de sí misma, y el libro se convierte en una estimulante mezcla de ensayo y autobiografía en la que confluyen dos autores –la estudiosa y el estudiado– separados por el tiempo, pero unidos por el interés en explorar los misterios del deseo femenino.
Traces D H Lawrence's troubled existence back to his working-class origins and gives a description of his life during the First World War after The Rainbow had been banned, when no-one would publish his work, and he became desperately poor.
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