George Douglas Brown Quotes

“Well, I suppose you have read the Green Shutters by this time. 'Tis a brutal and bloody work; too sinister, I should think, for a man of your kindlier disposition. There is too much black for the white in it. Even so, it is more complimentary to Scotland, I think, than the sentimental slop of Barrie and Crockett, and Maclaren. It was antagonism to their method that made me embitter the blackness; like old Gourlay I was "going to show the dogs what I thought of them." Which was a gross blunder, of course.”
― George Douglas Brown

“However harmful the kailyard tradition was to Scottish literature and the perception of Scotland, it invariably portrayed village or small town life in Scotland as harmonious and not umpleasant. At the beginning of the twentieth century, an anti-kailyard tradition of Scottish literature developed, most markedly represented by two novels: George Douglas Brown, 'The House with the Green Shutters (1901), and John MacDougall Hay, Gillespie (1914). Both were based on the authors' own experience of Scottish villages (Ochiltree and Tarbert respectively). Both display the unsavoury and tragic side of parochial life.

Could we view The Little White Town of Never Weary as a sort of riposte to this tradition? It certainly emphasises the more idyllic traditional life of rural market town and burgh.”
― Ian Spring, The Little White Town of Never Weary

“I have thought of writing and trying to give a truthful picture of Scottish life - a cross between Drumtochty and The House with the Green Shutters - but it would probably be reviewed as a 'feebly written story of life in a Scots provincial town' and then I would beat my pen into a hatpin and retreat from the literary arena.”
― Anna Masterton Buchan, Penny Plain