George Douglas
George Douglas, originally named George Douglas Brown, was a Scottish author educated at the University of Glasgow and Oxford. He moved to London, where he contributed writings to various periodicals and worked as a reader for a publishing house. His first literary work was a boy's adventure book titled "Love and a Sword," published under the pseudonym Kennedy King. Douglas is best known for his major novel, "The House with the Green Shutters," which provides a stark and realistic portrayal of Scottish life, earning him comparisons to notable authors like Thomas Hardy.
The novel critiques the overly sentimental representations of rural life prevalent in Kailyard literature, instead presenting a more somber view of the challenges faced by its characters. Critics praised its depiction of the harsh realities of a Scottish community, reflecting Douglas's belief in the difficulties of existence against an unyielding world. Although he envisioned a comprehensive historical romance set during the time of Oliver Cromwell, he passed away before he could develop this project further. Douglas's legacy remains significant in discussions of Scottish literary traditions and realism.
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George Douglas
Scottish novelist
- Born: January 26, 1869
- Birthplace: Ochiltree, Ayrshire, Scotland
- Died: August 28, 1902
- Place of death: London, England
Biography
George Douglas, born George Douglas Brown, was educated at the University of Glasgow and at Oxford. He then went to London, where he contributed articles to periodicals and worked as a reader for the publisher John Macqueen. Douglas’s first literary effort was a boy’s book, Love and a Sword, written under the pseudonym Kennedy King. {$S[A]Brown, George Douglas;Douglas, George}{$S[A]King, Kennedy;Douglas, George}
Douglas drew on his Scottish background for his only major novel, The House with the Green Shutters, a story of the grim and somber aspects of Scottish life. The novel was widely acclaimed as a realistic portrait of the hard life of the Scot, and Douglas’s sense of the grim rustic defeated by a world he never made caused critics to praise the work and describe Douglas as a Scottish Thomas Hardy.
The House with the Green Shutters, described by F. R. Hart as “one of the greatest of Scottish novels,” confronts head-on the tradition of Kailyard fiction, an overly sentimentalized portrait of rural Scottish life at the end of the nineteenth century. Douglas himself described the novel as “a brutal and bloody work” with “too much black for the white in it.” The novel works primarily not in its parody but because of the strength of its weak characters: the force of John Gourlay’s stubborn pride and competitiveness, the frustrated attempts of his son at independence, the incessant whimpering of his wife, the vicious inactivity of the town’s “bodies.” If the quaint, piously simplistic worldview of the Kailyarders is a failed version, so is the selfish, materialistic, faithless society of an increasingly mercantile and industrial Scotland at the dawn of a new century.
Douglas made elaborate plans to write a vast historical romance, based in the period of Oliver Cromwell, but he died before doing any significant amount of work on the project.
Bibliography
Blake, George. Barrie and the Kailyard School. London: A. Barker, 1951.
Campbell, Ian. Kailyard. Edinburgh: Ramsay Head Press, 1981.
Craig, Cairns, ed. The History of Scottish Literature. Vol. 4. Aberdeen, Scotland: Aberdeen University Press, 1987.
Hart, F. R. The Scottish Novel: From Smollett to Spark. Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press, 1978.
Lennox, Cuthbert. George Douglas Brown: A Memoir. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1903.
Letley, Emma. From Galt to Douglas Brown: Nineteenth Century Fiction and Scots Language. Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1988.
Veitch, James. George Douglas Brown. London: H. Jenkins, 1952.