Excuse my dust: Catherine Carswell
The Scottish Woman writer I enjoyed rediscovering was Catherine Carswell. I remember reading her first, prize-winning novel Open the Door maybe twenty years ago (when the small print, vile font and cheap paper of the Virago reprint did not annoy me) The book had astonished me with its feminist theme and strong sense of Glasgow in the early twentieth century.
For the course I read The Camomile, Carswell’s second novel (1922) again set in Glasgow. I loved its cover but forget who painted it. The story is told in a series of letters from Ellen Carstairs, recently returned from the Frankfurt Conservatory, abandoning ideas of making a living as a musician and instead longing to write. The letter form allows us to be right inside her experience and see how she develops during the (pleasantly) short book. Ellen is stifled by social convention, a religious family and by the expectations of a respectable fiancé she acquires along the way. The strengths of the book lie in the sense of place Carswell develops, the descriptions of the social life of church and girls’ school and the daring initiatives Ellen takes in renting a room to write and breaking off her engagement.
In the end Ellen moves away to London to continue her writing (and her liberation) as Carswell herself had managed to do. There is an autobiographical flavour to both these novels and I enjoyed tracing the similarities (and contrasts) by reading Lying Awake too: fragments of memoirs and autobiography brought together by Carswell's son. I wish Catherine had completed this since I loved her descriptions of her wild childhood holidays in rural Perthshire.