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15 Facts About Catherine Carswell

1.

Catherine Roxburgh Carswell was a Scottish author, biographer and journalist, now known as one of the few women to take part in the Scottish Renaissance.

2.

Catherine Carswell's work is seen as integral to Scottish women's writing of the early 20th century.

3.

Catherine Carswell attended the city's new Park School for Girls and grew up in Garnethill, where Glasgow School of Art is situated.

4.

Catherine Carswell attended evening classes there, where the director of the life class from 1906 was the painter Maurice Greiffenhagen, with whom she later had a relationship.

5.

Catherine Carswell then studied music for two years at the Frankfurt Hoch Conservatory, a period she drew on when writing The Camomile.

6.

Catherine Carswell returned to Glasgow intent on a future in the arts.

7.

Catherine Carswell married him after a "whirlwind courtship" of only a month.

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8.

Catherine Carswell was placed in a mental institution for the rest of his life, being considered too dangerous for release.

9.

Catherine Carswell never met his daughter, Diana, who was born the following October and died in 1913.

10.

In 1908 Catherine Carswell made legal history when her marriage with Herbert Jackson was dissolved after she had shown that his mental illness had started before their engagement, so that he was unaware of what he was doing when he married her.

11.

Catherine Carswell was her elder by 17 years, married and with a family.

12.

Catherine Carswell became well known only after finishing a controversial biography of Scotland's national poet, Robert Burns, in 1930.

13.

Lawrence, Catherine Carswell immediately started working on his biography, which appeared in 1932 as The Savage Pilgrimage.

14.

Catherine Carswell continued to live alone in London, working on a two-volume biography of John Buchan together with his widow, Lady Tweedsmuir.

15.

Catherine Carswell died of pleurisy after pneumonia on 18 February 1946, aged 66, at the Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford.