The Savage Pilgrimage

A man who prepared for death as carefully as he did for life… 

Catherine Carswell was a Scottish novelist, critic, journalist and biographer, as well as leading female figure in the Scottish Renaissance. 

Just two years after the death of D.H. Lawrence, The Savage Pilgrimage was published. 

Sympathetic and controversial in equal measure, it paints a detailed and compelling portrait of Lawrence. 

Catherine, who was divorced and later married to a barrister, maintained a fierce loyalty to Lawrence throughout her life – they became acquainted in 1914 and her authentic and sincere account draws from almost 200 letters and postcards she received from him. 

As a critic of new fiction, Carswell was a great and lifelong admirer of Lawrence’s work. 

Mapping out Lawrence’s troubled past and working class origins The Savage Pilgrimage presents the fascinating narrative of his life as an artist, through his own words and those of the close knit creative circles he moved in. 

Recalling his misfortune during the war, times of desperate poverty and the prohibition of The Rainbow, Carswell reveals intimate and extraordinary details of a fascinating man with a frequently misunderstood message.

Written primarily as a rebuttal in response to John Middleton Murry’s Son of Woman, The Savage Pilgrimage was originally found to be libellous. 

Murry resented the publication of a substantial account with first-hand detail that was far more laudatory and arguably accurate than his own. 

With a wealth of information and correspondence allowing, as Carswell states, ‘readers to judge for themselves’, The Savage Pilgrimage is a classic and thrilling account of one of the most influential authors of the 20th century.