ABSTRACT
School (1881-3) and then at Karlsruhe Gymnasium (1883-9). He entered the British Foreign Office for which he worked between 1893 and 1901, and was posted to St Petersburg between 1894 and 1896. He bought a house on Capri, the Mediterranean island about which he wrote eight books and, in 1898, he married his cousin Elizabeth Theobaldino FitzGibbon, with whom he had two sons. The marriage ended in 1904. Douglas became financially impoverished after 1907 and lived in poverty for about two decades with his later companion Guiseppe Orioli in Paris, St Malo, Menton, Florence, Lisbon, and London, before returning to Capri in 1946. Douglas’s first published work, which he thought of as contributing to the abolition of child labour, was an official report on The Pumice Stone Industry of the Lipari Islands (1895). He became better known for his geographical and topographical works Siren Land (1911), Fountain in the Sand (1912), and Old Calabria (1915). Between 1912 and 1914 Douglas was assistant editor of The English Review. He produced a number of other texts including London Street Games (1916), Looking Back (1933), and Late Harvest (1946). His only popular success was the hedonistic South Wind (1917).
