J M Barrie

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J. M. Barrie (Sir James Matthew Barrie) , 1860-1937, Scottish playwright and novelist. He is best remembered for his play Peter Pan (1904), a supernatural fantasy about a boy who refuses to grow up. The son of a weaver, Barrie studied at the Univ. of Edinburgh. He took up journalism, worked for a Nottingham newspaper, and contributed to various London journals before moving to London in 1885. His early works, Auld Licht Idylls (1889) and A Window in Thrums (1889), contain fictional sketches of Scottish life. The publication of The Little Minister (1891) established his reputation as a novelist. During the next 10 years Barrie continued writing novels, such as Sentimental Tommy (1896) and Tommy and Grizel (1900), but gradually his interest turned toward the theater. His early plays were mostly unsuccessful, but the dramatization in 1897 of The Little Minister established him as a playwright.

Although he is famous for the play Peter Pan; or, The Boy Who Would Not Grow Up and the novels Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens (1906) and Peter and Wendy (1911), many feel that Barrie's most accomplished work is the tragicomedy Dear Brutus (1917), in which he skillfully blends fantasy with realism and humor with pathos. His other notable plays include Quality Street (1901), The Admirable Crichton (1902), What Every Woman Knows (1908), and the one-act The Twelve-Pound Look (1911). Barrie's collected plays were published in 1928.

Barrie's life was dominated by his mother. This relationship left him emotionally immature and probably precipitated the failure of his marriage, and his lack of maturity is a discernible element in his works. Yet even though he has been criticized for whimsy and sentimentality, Barrie reveals in his best works a profound understanding of human nature and an unexpected capacity for irony and mordant wit. He was created a baronet in 1913 and was appointed to the Order of Merit in 1922. From 1930 until his death he was chancellor of the Univ. of Edinburgh.

Bibliography: See his letters (ed. by V. Meynell, 1947); biographies by J. Dunbar (1970), D. Mackail (1941, repr. 1972), C. Asquith (1955, repr. 1972), and A. Birkin (1979, repr. 2003); J. Wullschläger, Inventing Wonderland (1995).

Barrie, Sir J. M., ( James Matthew Barrie) (1860–1937), began working with the Nottinghamshire Journal. In 1888 he began his series of ‘Kailyard School’ stories and novels based on the life of ‘Thrums’, his home town of Kirriemuir, in Scotland. These included Auld Licht Idylls (1888), A Window in Thrums (1899), and his successful The Little Minister (1891). His first play, Richard Savage, was performed in London in 1891. In 1896 he published the first of his two most revealing books, Sentimental Tommy, followed by Tommy and Grizel (1900). Meanwhile came his sentimental comedy Quality Street, performed in 1901, and in 1902 the enduring play The Admirable Crichton (see Crichton). Peter Pan, his internationally famous children's play, first performed in 1904, grew from stories he had made up for the five sons of his friends Arthur and Sylvia Llewelyn Davies, to whom he gave a home on their parents' death. It was followed by a story, Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens (1906) and by the play in book form in 1911. What Every Woman Knows was performed in 1906, Dear Brutus in 1917, and Mary Rose in 1920.

He was made a baronet, awarded the OM, and received several honorary degrees. His fame and success were considerable for the first half of this century, but his unfashionable whimsicality has come to obscure the best of his work.