her elder by 17 years, married and with a family. Around this time she began to establish numerous literary connections. She later became a close friend of D. H. Lawrence. Her daughter Diana died of pneumonia in 1913, two years after they had moved to London. Around that time she started work on her first novel, Open the Door!, and became engaged to Donald Carswell, an acquaintance from Glasgow University and the Glasgow Herald, whom she married early in 1915. Their son John was born the following autumn. The same year she lost her job after writing a favourable review of Lawrence's The Rainbow, but remained in the press as assistant drama critic for the Observer. During the autumn of 1916 she had nearly finished her novel and exchanged lengthy letters about it with Lawrence, who in return asked for advice on his newest novel, Women in Love. Carswell's Open the Door! finally appeared in 1920 and won her a 250-guinea (£262.10s) Andrew Melrose Prize. Without being autobiographical, her story of the Glaswegian Joanna resembles in many ways her own life in search of independence. Melrose, who selected the book personally, said it made a "profound impression" on him. Two years later she published her second and last novel, The Camomile, another portrait of a woman living in Glasgow at the turn of the century. Biographer Neither of her first two books brought her fame or fortune. She became well known only after finishing a controversial biography of Scotland's national poet, Robert Burns, in 1930. Orthodox Burns fans dismissed this frank, demystifying account of the poet's life. The Burns Club attacked her with sermons in Glasgow Cathedral and someone sent her a bullet accompanied by a letter asking her to "make the world a cleaner place." After the death of D. H. Lawrence, Carswell immediately started working on his biography, which appeared in 1932 as The Savage Pilgrimage. The book's first printing contained passages regarded as libelous by John Middleton Murry, who tried to suppress it (he had authored a rival biography, Son of Woman, to which Carswell's work was essentially a response). Murry's threats to sue for libel resulted in the publisher, Chatto and Windus, withdrawing unsold copies of the first edition from the market and making changes and deletions that affected subsequent printings until, long after Murry's death in 1957, the original text was republished in 1981 by