Sir David Lindsay

David Lindsay was born the youngest of three children in Blackheath, of a Scottish father and an English mother. Brought up in London and with relatives in Jedburgh, Lindsay had to abandon his hopes of taking up a scholarship at university when his father deserted the family. Instead, Lindsay pursued a successful career as an insurance broker for twenty years, though he always nursed hopes of becoming a writer. During the First World War, Lindsay married his wife, eighteen years his junior, and subsequently resigned his city career and moved to Cornwall to fulfil his ambitions as a full-time novelist. Over the next twenty years, Lindsay produced five books and left two unpublished. His first novel, A Voyage to Arcturus (1920), has become a classic of imaginative fiction. The Haunted Woman, like Lindsay’s subsequent books, carried a disturbing metaphysical vision into the (apparently) conventional world of middle-class society. Eventually Lindsay became a recluse, and died in 1945 from an abscess of the jaw for which he refused medical treatment.