Nearly fifty years after it was written and thirty-five after the death of its author, the story of the author and this book can be told in context.

D. H. Lawrence dreamed from time to time of ideal communities and exerted an extraordinary magnetism on those he met, but he did not surround himself with like-minded people. Rather, he took people as he found them in his stormy life, preached at them, exalted them, quarrelled with them, and put them into his books. He married a German aristocrat, to whom he was inviolably faithful, endured a complicated attachment with a blue-coat boy from Camberwell, depended on a sombre and excitable Russian Jewish refugee, admired an ambitious short-story writer from New Zealand, and enjoyed the company of numerous Americans. He also had an enduring friendship with the literary woman from Glasgow who was the author of this book. This friendship was characterised by the most absolute trust.

Catherine Carswell, originally Catherine Roxburgh Macfarlane, was born in Glasgow in March 1879, some five years earlier than Lawrence, into the family of a god-fearing benevolent business man and his unworldly, deeply religious wife, as their second child. She has herself described the strict but loving atmosphere of her home in another book.

In the last twenty years of the nineteenth century Glasgow was a vigorous, outward-looking, imperial city, in spite of its poverty, slums, drunkenness, and oppressive Presbyterianism. Its intellectual life was strong.