J. M. Barrie

Life

James Matthew Barrie was born in 1860 in Kirriemuir, a weaving town in Angus, Scotland, the ninth of ten children. When he was six his elder brother David, his mother’s favorite, died in a skating accident, and biographers have often connected Barrie’s lifelong preoccupation with boys who never grow up to that loss. He was educated at Dumfries Academy and the University of Edinburgh, worked briefly as a journalist in Nottingham, and moved to London in 1885 to write.

Barrie made his name first with sentimental sketches of small-town Scottish life, collected as Auld Licht Idylls and A Window in Thrums, and with the novel The Little Minister. From the mid-1890s he turned mainly to the theater and became one of the most successful playwrights of the Edwardian era, with Quality Street, The Admirable Crichton, What Every Woman Knows and Dear Brutus among his hits. His marriage to the actress Mary Ansell ended in divorce in 1909. He had no children of his own but became guardian to the five sons of Arthur and Sylvia Llewelyn Davies after their parents’ deaths; his friendship with the boys was the seedbed of Peter Pan.

Barrie was made a baronet in 1913 and received the Order of Merit in 1922. He served as Rector of the University of St Andrews and Chancellor of the University of Edinburgh. He died in London in 1937 and is buried in Kirriemuir. In 1929 he gave the copyright of Peter Pan to Great Ormond Street Hospital for children, an arrangement that the United Kingdom later protected by a special provision in copyright law.

Literary significance

Barrie’s reputation now rests almost entirely on Peter Pan, which exists as a play (first performed in 1904, published in 1928), the novel Peter and Wendy (1911), and the earlier chapters in The Little White Bird (1902). The character and the setting of Neverland have passed into general culture through countless adaptations. Critics have paid increasing attention to the darker side of his writing: the sadness of the narrator’s voice, the treatment of mothers and memory, and the ambivalence about childhood that runs through his best plays as well.

Where to start

Peter Pan is the only Barrie in our catalog and the natural starting point. Readers who enjoy its narrator’s voice may want to look for The Little White Bird, where Peter first appeared, and for the plays, especially The Admirable Crichton and Dear Brutus.