Eh, the puir la-amb," she protested, dwelling on the vowels in fatuous, maternal love; "the bairn's wearied, man! He's ainything but strong, and the schooling's owre sore on him." Home> Fiction from Scotland> The House with the Green Shutters The House with the Green Shutters By (author) George Douglas Brown

Overall, The House with the Green Shutters was fascinating. I found it interesting in the sense that at the intro, I accepted that I wasn't going to like the main character--and, I assumed, the protagonist. Gourlay Sr., however, is not what I would call a protagonist.Chapter II. Describes how Gourlay dominates the carrying business in the town, and how his rights to the local quarry (due to expire in two years) were granted to him by the Laird of Templandmuir. Introduces Toddle, the Deacon, the Provost, and Coe. George Douglas Brown was born in 1869 in the little village of Ochiltree, near Mauchline in Ayrshire. The illegitimate son of a local farmer and the unlettered daughter of an Irish labourer, he was raised by his mother and educated at the village primary school. When he progressed to secondary education the rector of Ayr Academy helped him to gain a bursary to the University of Glasgow where he graduated in 1891 with first class honours and the Snell Exhibition Scholarship to Balliol. He took a lively part in Oxford student life, but his studies in Classics were interrupted by periods of ill-health and depression. He returned to Ochiltree in1895 to look after his dying mother and graduated later that year with a third class degree and plans to take up a career as a freelance journalist in London.

They gazed with blanched faces at the House with the Green Shutters, sitting there dark and terrible, beneath the radiant arch of the dawn. Mrs Gourlay raised her arms, like a gaunt sibyl, and spoke to her Maker, quietly, as if He were a man before her in the room. ‘Ruin and murder,’ she said slowly; ‘and madness; and death at my nipple like a child! When will Ye be satisfied?’ George Douglas Brown (26 January 1869 – 28 August 1902) was a Scottish novelist, best known for his highly influential realist novel The House with the Green Shutters (1901), which was published the year before his death at the age of 33.Marred as it is by errors of over-emphasis and a desire to compensate for the unthinking nostalgia of so much kailyard, The House with the Green Shutters is the testament of a young man who grew up in bitter poverty, the stigma of his illegitimacy never far from his mind, who worked his way, through ability and hard study, to Ayr Academy, to Glasgow and to Oxford. In the kailyard, he would have risen to the highest honours; in real life, after interrupting his studies to nurse his dying mother through cancer, Brown took a poor degree, wrote much journalism, some fiction and this superb ‘apologia’, and died. Chapter III. Introduces his 12-year-old son, John Gourlay, and describes the House with the Green Shutters. But that's very stupid, surely," said a visitor once, who thought of entering into competition. "It's cutting off his nose to spite his face! Why is he so anxious to be the only carrier in Barbie that he carries stuff for next to noathing the moment another man tries to work the roads? It's a daft-like thing to do!" So?" said Gourlay. "God, ay!" he went on; "you're making a nice job of him. He'll be a credit to the house. Oh, it's right, no doubt, that you should neglect your work till he consents to rise." James Wilson no es que sea mejor que él. No es mejor que nadie. Es otro tipo rastrero cuyo único interés es ganar dinero de la manera que sea y utilizando a quien sea necesario. Frente al primitivismo de Gourlay (un primitivismo basado en la fuerza bruta, en los puños, en el miedo), Wilson es el futuro. El hombre que piensa. Mejor: el hombre que intriga. Contra él, no hay ninguna violencia posible. Y con él empieza la decadencia del otro. Pero hay más.