C. A. Dawson Scott

Catherine Amy Dawson Scott (August 1865 – 4 November 1934) was an English writer, playwright and poet. She is best known as a co-founder (in 1921) of English PEN, one of the world's first non-governmental organisations and among the first international bodies advocating for human rights, and the founding centre of PEN International, a worldwide association of writers. In her later years she became a keen spiritualist.

Early life and education

She was born in 1865 in Dulwich to Ebenezer Dawson, a brick manufacturer, and his wife Catherine Armstrong. Her sister, Ellen M. Dawson, was born about 1868. Henry Dawson Lowry (Cornwall) was her cousin. Catherine Amy's mother died in January 1877, when she was 11 and her younger sister was seven years old.Their father remarried in 1878 and by 1881, the girls and their stepmother were living or staying with her widowed mother, Sarah Ancell, in Camberwell, where Catherine A. Dawson graduated from Anglo German College.

Career

At 18, she began working as a secretary, while also writing. Her Charades For Home Acting (44 pp.) was published by Woodford Fawcett and Co. in 1888. Sappho, an epic poem 210 pages long, was published by Kegan Paul, Trench and Co. in 1889, at her own expense. She followed with Idylls of Womanhood, a collection of poetry published by William Heinemann in 1892.

At the age of 33, she married a medical doctor named Horatio Francis Ninian Scott. They lived in Hanover Square, London, where their first child, Marjorie Catharine Waiora Scott, was born in 1899; they also had a son, Horatio Christopher L. Scott, born in March 1901. Then the family moved to West Cowes on the Isle of Wight in the summer of 1902, where they lived for the next seven years. Another child, Edward Walter Lucas Scott, nicknamed Toby, was born in June 1904.