Lying Awake

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 whe…