Born in Glasgow, Scotland

Catherine Roxburgh Macfarlane was born on 27 March 1879 in Glasgow, Scotland, into a devout and comfortably middle-class merchant family. Her father, George Macfarlane, was an East India merchant, and her mother, Mary, raised her within the strict tenets of the Gospel Hall sect of Presbyterianism, an upbringing that would later inform the tension in Carswell's own fiction between religious repression and individual freedom.

She was educated in Glasgow and later spent a formative period studying music and singing in Germany, at Frankfurt, before returning to Scotland to study at Glasgow University as an occasional student — an unusual step for a woman of her generation, at a time when women's access to higher education was still heavily restricted.

This early exposure to European culture, combined with her rigorous, questioning intellect, shaped the independent-minded woman who would go on to become one of the most controversial literary biographers and novelists of interwar Scotland. Her birth into a period of rapid change for women's education and social roles positioned her to later challenge convention both in her personal life and her writing.