Catherine Carswell

First published in 1922, The Camomile opens with Ellen and her brother Ronald living under the strict oversight of their religious aunt in Glasgow. Her confidence bolstered, having spent three years studying music in Germany, Ellen finds a position teaching music, and uses this position to rent a room away from home. Published seven years ahead of A Room of One’s Own, and often compared to Woolf’s masterpiece, The Camomile is a stirring and fascinating work that exposes the difficulties for women to make it in the creative arts, and it still resounds with truth today.

'the chamomile, the more it is trodden on, the faster is grows.'Shakespeare, Henry IV part 1The opening quote of The Camomile provides an insight into the book's title. The narrative highlights the tensions for a woman in the early twentieth century between the desire to explore her creativity and the duties expected of her as a prospective wife. Through a series of journal entries, which form an extended letter to her best friend, we follow the protagonist, Ellen, who rents out a room away from her family to provide a quiet space in which to focus on her music and her writing. Ellen is a lively soul who wants the freedom to express herself and she finds a champion of her endeavours at the Mitchell Library. But as she falls in love and becomes betrothed to a doctor who is soon to return to India, she finds herself increasingly conflicted and has to eventually make a choice.

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.

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" a biography of Lawrence, was written partly in reply to Murry.