Catherine Roxburgh Carswell (née Macfarlane; 27 March 1879 – 18 February 1946) was a Scottish author, biographer and journalist, now known as one of the few women to take part in the Scottish Renaissance. Her biography of the Scottish poet Robert Burns aroused controversy, but two earlier novels of hers, set in Edwardian Glasgow, were little noticed until their republication by the feminist publishing house Virago in 1987. Her work is now seen as integral to Scottish women's writing of the early 20th century. Early life Catherine Macfarlane was born in Glasgow, the second of four children of George and Mary Anne Macfarlane (née Lewis), middle-class Free Church Glaswegians. She attended the city's new Park School for Girls and grew up in Garnethill, where Glasgow School of Art is situated. She attended evening classes there, where the director of the life class from 1906 was the painter Maurice Greiffenhagen, with whom she later had a relationship. In 1901 she enrolled for English literature classes at the University of Glasgow. Among her professors were Walter Raleigh and Adolphus A. Jack. Although seen as a star pupil she could not, as a woman, be awarded a degree. She then studied music for two years at the Frankfurt Hoch Conservatory, a period she drew on when writing The Camomile. She returned to Glasgow intent on a future in the arts. First marriage In September 1904, Macfarlane met her first husband, Herbert Jackson, a Second Boer War veteran and artist suffering from paranoid delusions. She married him after a "whirlwind courtship" of only a month. Thinking he was sterile, he accused Catherine of betraying him when he heard news of her pregnancy and in March 1905 threatened to kill her. He was placed in a mental institution for the rest of his life, being considered too dangerous for release. He never met his daughter, Diana, who was born the following October and died in 1913. In 1908 Catherine made legal history when her marriage with Herbert Jackson was dissolved after she had shown that his mental illness had started before their engagement, so that he was unaware of what he was doing when he married her. Critic and writer Working as a critic for the Glasgow Herald, Macfarlane began a relationship with the artist Maurice Greiffenhagen, who then was at the height of his fame and went on to be an academician. He was