{"product_id":"lying-awake-1","title":"Lying Awake","description":"\u003cp\u003eAs 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe younger  daughter of a Glasgow shipping merchant, Catherine Macfarlane studied  music in Frankfurt before returning to Glasgow and then moving to London  where she worked as a literary and dramatic reviewer and met her second  husband, Donald Carswell, and a wide circle of literary and cultural  figures, including a succession of Soviet ambassadors, Lady Tweedsmuir  and D.H. Laurence. In fact she became one of Laurence's close friends,  and it was he who encouraged her to write her first novel, \u003ci\u003eOpen the Door!\u003c\/i\u003e, based on her own background and a sense of growing social and spiritual independence.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eCarswell's interests and enthusiasms encompassed (among others) Herzen, Dickens, T.S. Eliot, Rabelais, Burns and Boccaccio, but \u003ci\u003eLying Awake\u003c\/i\u003e  is the distillation of her thoughts on her own life and indeed on the  nature of identity and autobiography itself. Left unfinished when she  died in 1946, the manuscript was edited by her son John and has not been  reprinted since it was first published in 1950.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Canongate Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56244235862360,"sku":"9780862416836","price":17.99,"currency_code":"EUR","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0278\/1295\/4195\/files\/9780862416836_31c46a09-f2a2-4ca2-8fbe-bda4196e82e9.jpg?v=1765933240","url":"https:\/\/agendabookshop.com\/products\/lying-awake-1","provider":"Agenda Bookshop","version":"1.0","type":"link"}