Catherine MacFarlane Jackson Carswell began her career as a musician who enjoyed writing and literature, interests she claimed to have inherited from her mother. Her early music training became a central motif in both her novels: Open the Door! (1920) and The Camomile (1922). But two years of study in Frankfurt (around 1897-1899) convinced her to pursue a career in literature. She felt, as does her protagonist Joanna in Open the Door!, that her music did not "live" and she wanted, above all, an art that was alive. After the annulment of her first marriage in 1903, Carswell returned to Glasgow with her daughter and became an "informal" literature student at Glasgow University. In 1907 she became a reviewer and critic for the Glasgow Herald. She was fired from the Herald for favorably reviewing D. H. Lawrence's The Rainbow .

Carswell wrote reviews for the Herald and later the London Observer late at...