Anna Buchan
Anna Buchan (1877-1948) has long been overshadowed as a writer by her more famous older brother John, author of Greenmantle, Prester John, and The Thirty-Nine Steps, among other adventure stories. But during her lifetime she too was one of the publishing house Hodder & Stoughton’s top-selling authors.
Buchan’s father was a Free Church minister, and the family’s removal from Kirkcaldy, where she was born, to Glasgow in 1888, marked his acceptance of a position at John Knox Church in the Gorbals. Buchan recalls in her autobiography that, despite having a clergyman for a father, “Calvinism sat lightly on our shoulders,” as he taught them to share his love of Shakespeare’s and Walter Scott’s works, and to enjoy the Bible as a work of literature as well as a source of truth.
Buchan spent more of her adult life in Peeblesshire, where she kept house for her brother Walter until after her father’s death in 1911, from which time forward she lived with her mother. In 1907 she visited her brother William in India, and her experiences of Anglo-Indian society formed the basis of her first book, Olivia in India. It was from this semi-autobiographical account that she took her pseudonym, O. Douglas, explaining self-deprecatingly that “John had given lustre to the name of Buchan which any efforts of mine would not be likely to add to.”
Buchan’s novels bear the imprint of her home life. The Setons (1919) and Penny Plain (1921) are overshadowed by the death of her youngest brother Alastair in the Battle of Aras in 1917. Eliza for Common describes the coming of age a young woman very like Buchan, in a middle-class, Free Church family in Glasgow; and The Proper Place describes the transformation of the Scottish borders as the gentry’s power declined and wealthy middle-class families moved from the city to take their place.
As her brother John’s political career developed, Buchan was called upon to play a supporting role. When he became the Unionist candidate for Peebles and Selkirk, she became “county secretary to the Women’s Unionist Association and had to try to arouse interest in politics by getting up concerts and social meetings” (125). However, she kept up her writing, publishing a novel roughly every two years throughout the 1920s and ‘30s, and her popularity among readers meant that she was frequently asked to open church bazaars or to speak to charitable organizations. Buchan published her autobiography, Unforgettable, Unforgotten on the eve of World War II, after which she wrote no more novels.
Bibliography
Beth Dickson, “Annie S. Swan and O. Douglas: Legacies of the Kailyard,” A History of Scottish Women’s Writing, ed. Douglas Gifford and Dorothy McMillan (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997), pp. 329-346.
Wendy Forrester, Anna Buchan and O. Douglas (London: The Maitland Press, 1995).
Debbie Sly, “Pink Sugary Pleasures: Reading the Novels of O. Douglas,” The Journal of Popular Culture 35.1 (2001), pp. 5-19.