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.
In September 1904, Macfarlane met her first husband, Herbert Jackson, a Second Boer War veteran and artist suffering from paranoid delusions.
[2] 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.
[3] 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.
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.
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.
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).
In the 1930s there followed three anthologies, some journalistic reviews, and a third biography, The Tranquil Heart (1937), about the Italian Renaissance author and poet Giovanni Boccaccio.
In 1936 came a publication dedicated to Lord Tweedsmuir (John Buchan), written in collaboration with her husband Donald and illustrator Evelyn Dunbar (later commissioned as one of the few female official British WW2 artists): The Scots Week-End and Caledonian Vade-Mecum for Host, Guest and Wayfarer (George Routledge & Sons Ltd).