If you are familiar with the writer Catherine Carswell there is a good chance it is for her work as the biographer of D.H. Lawrence, the Italian writer Giovanni Boccaccio, and most famously, and for some controversially, of Robert Burns. Her 1930 book The Life of Robert Burns prompted protests and death threats, including a bullet in the post, with many Burns’ fundamentalists accusing her of damaging the poet’s reputation. Aside from her non-fiction Carswell also wrote two ex