George Norman Douglas (8 December 1868 – 7 February 1952) was a British writer, now best known for his 1917 novel South Wind. His travel books, such as Old Calabria (1915), were also appreciated for the quality of their writing.
His sexual encounters with children—girls and boys, some as young as eleven—led to charges of indecent assault and his flight from England to Italy. He subsequently fled Florence to avoid arrest for the rape of a 10-year-old girl. His biographer Rachel Hope Cleves described him in 2020 as "[b]y present standards... a monster".
Life
Norman Douglas was born in Thüringen, Austria (his surname was registered at birth as Douglass; he dropped the second s as an adult). His mother was the German-Scottish aristocrat Vanda von Poellnitz (1840–1902). His father, John Sholto Douglass (1838–1874), was the 15th Laird of Tilquhillie. He was the manager of a local cotton mill; in his spare time, he was an archaeologist, researching the history of the Vorarlberg, and was also an enthusiastic mountaineer. Douglas's paternal grandfather, the 14th Laird of Tilquhillie, had established the factory in the 1830s, in order to pay off debts on his ancestral lands in Aberdeenshire. Douglas's maternal great-grandfather was General James Ochoncar Forbes, 17th Lord Forbes. Douglas had an older brother, John, and a younger sister, Mary. John "remained devout throughout his life, but Douglas came to consider religion a pernicious absurdity". "In September 1874, when Douglas was five years old, his father, John Sholto Douglass, fell a thousand feet to his death while hunting chamois in the mountains". "It's probable that the death of his father, a devout Presbyterian, contributed to Douglas's rejection of religion".
