Scottish Authors > George Douglas Brown Novelist 1869-1902

George Douglas Brown, who sometimes wrote under the pen names Kennedy King and George Douglas, was born on 26th January 1869 in Ochiltree, Ayrshire to George Douglas Brown, a farmer, and Sarah Gemmel, a farm-servant of Irish descent; Brown was illegitimate. He was educated at local schools in Ochiltree and Coylton, attending Ayr Academy from 1883. From 1887-1890 he studied at the University of Glasgow, taking a First in Classics and in 1891 he won a scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford. Although maintaining his academic record, he did not enjoy Oxford, feeling that he did not fit in socially. Before he was due to sit his final examinations, he returned to Ayrshire to nurse his mother in her last illness; the consequent mixture of stress and grief contributed to his taking only a third class degree in the examinations of 1895.

Brown settled in London and made his living by journalism and teaching. In 1899 he published Love and a sword under the pen name "Kennedy King". He contributed a mixture of short fictions and critical articles to various journals including Blackwood's magazine and also "read" for the publisher John MacQueen. In the autumn of 1900 he began writing the book for which he became famous, The House with the green shutters. Brown's health failed in 1902 and he died at the London home of his friend Andrew Melrose. He was buried in Ayr, beside his mother.

When it was published in 1901, The House with the green shutters was acclaimed by critics as a counterblast to the current fashion for "Kailyard fiction", popular fiction which dealt in stereotypes of Scottish rural life showing small communities working together with wit and homely wisdom to overcome life's difficulties. By contrast, Brown's small community, Barbie, based on Ochiltree, is a nest of jealousy and spite, often expressed in the "barbed" comments of the "bodies", local gossips. They are resentful of Gourlay's success which comes from his carting business and has brought him his great prize, his house with the green shutters. Gourlay, domineering and brutish, is not commercially acute enough to change his business methods as industrialisation begins to affect Ayrshire. After some damaging setbacks, Gourlay sends his son to University to train him for a safe professional position which will restore the family fortunes. Though gifted, young John Gourlay is temperamentally unstable. He slides into alcoholism, returns to Barbie in disgrace and provoked by the "bodies"; murders his father in a fit of drunken resentment. John, his mother and sister, then take their own lives.

Because of its unsentimental portrayal of Scottish life, The House with the green shutters was championed by emerging Scottish Modernists, such as Hugh MacDiarmid, Lewis Grassic Gibbon and Neil Gunn. Later critics have noted in the harsh, laconic character of John Gourlay and the demonic images in which he is sometimes cast, close links with the work of Robert Burns, Walter Scott, James Hogg and Robert Louis Stevenson while the work's superbly fluent Scots is reminiscent of John Galt, a writer Brown greatly admired.

Beth Dickson

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