J. M. BARRIE

James Matthew Barrie was born on May 9, 1860, in Kirriemuir, Scotland, the ninth child and third and youngest son of David Barrie, a handloom weaver, and Margaret Ogilvy, who, following Scottish tradition, kept her maiden name among friends and family. In January 1867, when Barrie was six years old, his older brother David died in a skating accident on the eve of his fourteenth birthday, an event that haunted Barrie for the rest of his life.

Barrie’s love of the theater bloomed at Dumfries Academy, which he attended for five years, beginning at age thirteen. He earned his master of arts degree in English literature from Edinburgh University in 1882. The next year he became leader-writer and sub-editor for the Nottingham Journal. In 1885 he moved to London, where he worked as a free-lance journalist; he self-published his first novel, Better Dead, two years later. With his second book, a collection of sketches titled Auld Licht Idylls (1888), he achieved recognition as a writer, and his reputation increased with the publication the same year of the novel When a Man’s Single. In 1889 his A Window in Thrums appeared, and in 1891 he published the popular novel The Little Minister.

Barrie had his first commercial theatrical success with Walker, London (1892). Two years later he married Mary Ansell, an actress who had performed one of the play’s leading roles. In 1896 two of Barrie’s works were published: the novel Sentimental Tommy (its sequel, Tommy and Grizel, appeared in 1900), and Margaret Ogilvy, a memoir of his mother. Barrie first met George and Sylvia Llewelyn Davies and their sons George and Jack in 1897. The author’s play-acting with the boys was the principal source of material for his play Peter Pan; or, The Boy Who Would Not Grow Up.

Barrie’s 1902 novel The Little White Bird contains an early version of Peter Pan and describes Peter’s life as a baby. Over the course of the next nine years, Barrie refined Peter Pan in various stage productions and publications. The play version of the story opened at the Duke of York’s Theatre on December 27,1904. Two years later, Barrie extracted six chapters from The Little White Bird that he published as Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, and in 1911 he published the novel Peter and Wendy; longer than Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, this book is now known simply as Peter Pan.

Barrie and his wife divorced in 1909. He never remarried, but the next year he acquired a family when Sylvia, the mother of the Llewelyn Davies boys, died (her husband had died in 1907) and Barrie adopted her sons (there were now five boys). In 1915 George, the oldest boy, was killed in World War I during an advance on the Germans. The same year Charles Frohman, Barrie’s producer, went down on the passenger ship the Lusitania when a German torpedo hit it. Nevertheless, the next six years were fairly productive for Barrie as a writer and happy for him as a father, until Michael, the fourth of the brothers, drowned while swimming in a millpond with a friend. Barrie never recovered from Michael’s death, which effectively brought his creative output to a halt.

In addition to the play Peter Pan, Barrie had a string of hits in the theater: the theatrical version of The Little Minister (1897), Quality Street and The Admirable Crichton (both 1902), and What Every Woman Knows (1908). A Kiss for Cinderella opened in 1916 and was often revived in London around Christmastime. Two fantasy plays followed: In Dear Brutus (1917), a group of people encounter their alternate destinies when they enter a magic forest, and in Mary Rose (1920), a woman dies young and returns to her family years later as a ghost, unable to recognize her now aged son. Barrie’s last play, The Boy David, opened in 1936 and was not successful. On June 19, 1937, J. M. Barrie died. He was buried with his family in Kirriemuir cemetery.