Lying awake - Catherine Carswell

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.