Farewell Miss Julie Logan

Edited and introduced by Andrew Nash. This selection of J M Barrie’s work covers three different genres and all the most telling themes found in his writing: Scotland, childhood, fantasy and sentimentality, sexual anxiety, theatrical invention, social comedy and proto-feminism. The disturbing prose fable of The Little White Bird contains the first and most original exploration of the Peter Pan theme, properly set in the wider context of a middle-aged man’s engagement with creation, fantasy and loneliness—a theme which made Barrie world-famous and haunted him for the rest of his life. In a one-act play of scintillating satire, The Twelve-Pound Look exposes the pomposities of male pride and public success in 1910 from the point of view of an ex-wife unexpectedly returned as her (be)knighted husband’s typist. Written in diary form and telling of an uncanny romance in a remote winter glen, Farewell Miss Julie Logan evokes the author’s fascination with longing, death and loss in a...