Background
The illegitimate son of a well-educated farmer, Brown was born on January 26, 1869, in Ochiltree, East Ayrshire, United Kingdom, and raised by his mother Sarah Gemmel, who worked to support him.
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1901
The illegitimate son of a well-educated farmer, Brown was born on January 26, 1869, in Ochiltree, East Ayrshire, United Kingdom, and raised by his mother Sarah Gemmel, who worked to support him.
Brown attended various local schools, including the prestigious Ayr Academy, where he distinguished himself as an excellent student with a particular talent in literature. In 1887 he entered the University of Glasgow to study classics, receiving Bachelor of Arts degree; upon his graduation in 1890 as a Master of Arts, he received a scholarship to continue his education at Oxford University. Brown was older than his classmates and lived in near poverty, and he later maintained that this had been the most miserable period of his life. His studies were interrupted by the illness of his mother; he returned to Ayrshire to nurse her, but she died, and in 1895 he barely passed his final examinations.
Brown settled in London, determined to establish himself as a writer.
In London, Brown supported himself as a freelance journalist, contributing articles, poems, short stories, and book reviews to various publications and writing a juvenile adventure story titled Love and a Sword, which was published in 1899 under the pseudonym Kennedy King. During this time he eschewed steady work in order to concentrate on developing ideas for a novel. In 1901 Brown achieved sudden popular and critical acclaim for his realistic portrayal of Scotland in The House with the Green Shutters. With the royalties he received from the novel, he retired to semi-seclusion in Haslemere. There he continued work on a critical study of Hamlet that he had begun several years before and began writing three more novels: a historical romance set during the era of Oliver Cromwell, a study of the life of a writer entitled The Novelist, and a chronicle of an unhappy marriage entitled The Incompatibles. None of these works was ever finished.
The House with the Green Shutters has been praised for its vivid description of Scottish life, its apt characterizations, and its accurate presentation of Scottish dialect, all drawn from Brown’s personal experiences. The most striking characteristic of the novel is its grim tone and tragic subject matter. In sharp contrast to the romanticized Scotland of the Kailyarders, Brown’s Scotland offers a bleak landscape inhabited by spiteful characters. The Kailyarders, most prominently J. M. Barrie, S. R. Crockett, and Ian Maclaren, were noted for their strong feelings of sympathy with their characters; Brown is wholly unsympathetic to the society of Barbie, the small village in which most of the action of his novel takes place, and critics note that the reader is more likely to feel disgust than compassion for his characters. Brown believed that the Kailyarders did not accurately portray the rural Scotland that he had known as a youth, the Scotland from which he felt alienated due to his illegitimate birth and broad education.
Brown’s aim in writing The House with the Green Shutters was to present the darker side of Scottish life that had previously been ignored.
Many critics have written that Brown overemphasized the weaknesses of his characters, allowing his animus toward Scotland to dominate his novel, making it, in the words of W. M. Parker in Modern Scottish Writers, “too brutal to be wholly artistic.” Others have seen Brown’s excesses as social criticism of the rural Scottish communities and, alternatively, as an expression of “theological furor” and “profound revulsion” against the petty malignancy of humanity. Propelled by this moral imperative, along with the strength of its characterization and the imaginative force of its narration, The House with the Green Shutters brought a new perspective and purpose to Scottish literature.
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1901
Quotations:
If a man’s success offends your individuality, to say everything you can against him is a recognised weapon of the fight. It takes him down a bit. And (inversely) elevates his rival.
To break a man’s spirit so, take that from him which he will never recover while he lives, send him slinking away animo castrato – for that is what it comes to – is a sinister outrage of the world. It is as bad as the rape of a woman, and ranks with the sin against the Holy Ghost – derives from it, indeed.
No man has a keener eye for behaviour than the Scot.