The biography of Catherine Carswell grew out of my interest in the group of writers living in and around London during the early part of the twentieth century. I began my research with the New Zealand writer, Katherine Mansfield, and later extended it to D. H. Lawrence. I had become captivated by the literary milieu in which these writers lived and worked. While preparing the manuscripts for books that dealt with the critical histories of Mansfield and Lawrence, I became aware of Mansfield’s review of Catherine Carswell’s Open the Door, a novel that had recently been brought back into print. The review was not laudatory but I read the novel anyway, fascinated by the work and the woman described in the introduction by her son, John Carswell. So began a rich journey that took me to and fro between Scotland and New Zealand, brought me many good friends and colleagues, not the least of whom were John and Ianthe Carswell and their family.

   Catherine Carswell was a Scottish novelist, biographer and critic, and was recognised as a substantial figure among the members of the Scottish Renaissance. Her Edwardian novels, set in the West End of Glasgow, were strikingly original. I was not Scottish and neither lived nor worked in Britain, but I did have three Scottish colleagues to encourage my interest. It was with some trepidation that I first contacted John Carswell and suggested that I would like to write a biography of his mother. I need not have worried. I was generously welcomed by John and Ianthe, both of them excellent writers with exciting intellects, and I spent many happy hours in their Hampstead home, learning about Catherine’s family, her friends and how she and Donald lived. To hear first-hand the stories of someone who remembered his uncle carrying a drunken Lawrence upstairs to bed, who spent summers playing in the gardens at Sissinghurst when Vita Sackville-West was there and who remembered so many of the figures I had only read about, I count as one of the great privileges of my work.

   Over time, I added many Scottish colleagues, also working on the women writers of Scotland, to my list of friends and owe a debt of gratitude to them all for helping me to understand what it meant to be Scottish and a metropolitan. Catherine spent much of her working life in London, yet, to the end, remained of Glasgow and Scotland, the place to which her fiction returns her again and again. Catherine’s Life of Robert Burns produced a furore in Scottish newspapers for its depiction of a man, rather than a legend, as indomitable as she was – she rarely turned down an invitation to address the haggis. As a journalist, she knew many of the great literary figures of her day in Scotland, England and America. She worked with the Irishman William Fay to write a history of the Abbey Theatre, and was the lifelong friend of the novelist D. H. Lawrence, remaining his supporter throughout his battles with British censorship. Her photograph taken of Lawrence, in Italy, is one of the few that demonstrates his smile.

   As an Edwardian Catherine Carswell was heir to Glasgow’s nineteenth century – its godliness, its realism, its modernity and its sentimentality. As a well-travelled twentieth-century woman who lived in London from 1910, she visited Italy, Germany and France, and met most of Stalin’s cabinet in pre-war Russia. She was rebellious, determined, intellectual and no stranger to conflict. Her life tells us much about women’s lives and their writing in the early years of the twentieth century, but more than that, it tells us much about ourselves.

                                                                                                                        Jan Pilditch