1885–1894
‘The most precious possession I ever had [was] my joy in hard work. I do not know when it came to me—not very early, because I was an idler at school, and read all the wrong books at college. But I fell in love with hard work one fine May morning. … I found her waiting for me at a London station [and] she marched with me all the way to Bloomsbury. … Hard work, more than any woman in the world, is the one who stands up best for her man.’1
Barrie's first novel. When asked his opinion of it in later years, Barrie's reply was the title
For once, this was no exaggeration. Hard work took Barrie's mind off his increasing bouts of depression, when he would ‘lie awake busy with the problems of my personality’.2 Moreover it was sheer hard work that took him, within the space of three years, to the top of his profession. By 1887 he was contributing articles to virtually every prestigious publication in the country, including W. E. Henley's influential National Observer in the select company of Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling, H. G. Wells and W. B. Yeats.
A ‘Souvenir of Thrums’: picture postcards such as this were commonplace in Kirriemuir during the 1890s, marketed for literary tourists hunting out the scenes of the Thrums novels
Barrie writing The Little Minister at Strath View in 1890. The little minister of the title is Gavin Ogilvy: ‘“It's a pity I'm so little, mother,” he said with a sigh. “You're no' what I would call a particularly long man,” Margaret said, “but you're just the height I like.” … Though even Margaret was not aware of it, Gavin's shortness had grieved him all his life.’
But journalism was only a stepping-stone; literature was still his game, and in 1888 he tried his hand at his first novel, Better Dead. The title was somewhat apt, and Barrie, who had it published at his own expense, lost £25 to experience. The book was cool, witty and satirical, but, like his articles for the Nottingham Journal, it was too sophisticated for the general reader. He had written it from his head, not from his heart—indeed one reviewer went so far as to suggest that the novel was a collaboration between Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde. Undaunted, Barrie collected together his old articles from the St James's Gazette on the Auld Lichts, and offered them in book form to Hodder and Stoughton, who cautiously agreed to publish it. When Auld Licht Idylls appeared on the bookstalls in April 1888, it was greeted with a chorus of praise from reviewers and public alike, while its sequel, A Window in Thrums, put Barrie among the authors and Thrums among the places which the reading public knew better than their own homes. Thrums was, of course, the Kirriemuir of Margaret Ogilvy's childhood, as were many of the stories and characters. But the style in which they were told was unique to Barrie. After years of repressing his sentimental streak, he had at last allowed it to blend with his intellect and humour. This sentiment had a reverse side, a form of genial sadism. As The Times later observed, Barrie could be ‘as hard as nails, as cruel as the grave, as cynical as the Fiend. … The cruelty in him came of his intellectual vision; the tenderness came of his warm, trusting, but painfully sensitive heart.’ The results repelled a number of readers, while others, particularly in Scotland, were indignant at the way in which Barrie chose to portray his fellow countrymen in the Thrums novels. The critic George Blake wrote: ‘It is perhaps the most puzzling thing about Barrie from first to last that the expert toucher of emotions, the weaver of charmingly whimsical webs, the delight of the nurseries, had in all his dealings as a writer with such topics as death and sepulture and grief and suffering the way of a sadist.’3
Barrie's third Thrums novel, The Little Minister, appeared in 1891 and was hailed as ‘A Book of Genius’ in a front-page review by the National Observer. The book's success was not limited to Great Britain: in New York alone, five publishers brought out their own pirated editions, and sales throughout the British Empire turned it into an international best-seller. If Barrie had lost a few of his more intellectual admirers, he had gained a world-wide readership that would remain solidly behind him for over half a century. Nor was his following restricted to the common man; Barrie's boyhood hero, Robert Louis Stevenson, wrote to Henry James from his island retreat in the South Pacific:
‘Hurry up with another book of stories. I am now reduced to two of my contemporaries, you and Barrie—O, and Kipling—you and Barrie and Kipling are now my Muses Three. And with Kipling, as you know, there are reservations to be made. … But Barrie is a beauty, the Little Minister and The Window in Thrums, eh? Stuff in that young man; but he must see and not be too funny. Genius in him, but there's a journalist at his elbow—there's the risk.’4
Stevenson later wrote to Barrie in person:
‘I am proud to think you are a Scotchman … and please do not think when I thus seem to bracket myself with you, that I am wholly blinded with vanity. … I am a capable artist; but it begins to look to me as if you are a man of genius.’5
Barrie's friendship with Stevenson was restricted to a lengthy correspondence, but his increasing fame brought him into close contact and friendship with a number of other writers, despite his somewhat cultivated reputation for shyness and inaccessibility. Closest of all were George Meredith and Thomas Hardy:
Barrie and George Meredith
‘The most satisfactory thing in my little literary history is that the two whom as writers I have most admired became the two whom as men I have most loved. Hardy I first met at a club in Piccadilly, where he had asked me to lunch. It is a club where they afterwards adjourn to the smoking-room and talk for a breathless hour or two about style. Hardy's small contribution made no mark, but I thought how interesting that the only man among you who doesn't know all about style and a good deal more is the only man among you who has got a style.’6
In 1890, Barrie recruited some of his friends into his own cricket club, the Allahakbars (Arabic for ‘Heaven help us!’), afterwards changed with complimentary intentions to the Allahakbarries. He soon found, however, that the more distinguished as authors his men were, the worse they played. Over the years, the Allahakbarries increased their reputation, if not their skill, and sometime members included Conan Doyle, Will Meredith, Charles Turley Smith, A. E. W. Mason and P. G. Wodehouse.
Two Allahakbarries: Barrie (in straw hat) and Bernard Partridge
Barrie's circle of friends had also expanded to include the children of many of his associates: Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch's son Bevil, W. Robertson Nicoll's two children, and W. E. Henley's daughter Margaret, who christened Barrie ‘my Friendy’, but because she couldn't pronounce her r's, it came out as ‘my Wendy’—a non-existent name at that time. Meanwhile his young nieces in Scotland now had two brothers, Charlie and Willie. Charlie was exceptionally good-looking and intelligent, which appealed to Barrie; he was also extremely destructive and anarchistic, which appealed to him even more. His younger brother Willie was well-mannered, obedient and polite—a very conventional affair compared to Charlie, and consequently a rather dull companion. Unlike Kingsley, Carroll and Wordsworth, Barrie rarely perceived children as trailing clouds of glory; he saw them as ‘gay and innocent and heartless’7 creatures, inspired as much by the devil as by God. He exulted in their contradictions: their wayward appetites, their lack of morals, their conceit, their ingratitude, their cruelty, juxtaposed with gaiety, warmth, tenderness, and the sudden floods of emotion that come without warning and are as soon forgotten. Their unpredictable nature was a source of constant fascination and delight to him. Barrie knew exactly how to win a boy's affection: flatter his insatiable ego, treat him as an equal, and play him at his own game. When Charlie teased and flirted, his uncle would respond with the same tactics; when he hurt his feelings, Barrie would hurt back with equal relish.
Margaret Henley, who died at the age of 6. Her cloak was later copied for Wendy, the name she invented
Never one to waste good copy, Barrie turned his young nephews into bread and butter on several occasions. In My Lady Nicotine, a novel extolling the joys of smoking, Charlie appears thinly disguised as Primus, a wily nephew who steals his uncle's cigarettes and smokes them with a friend in Kensington Gardens. On another occasion, a visit from his nephew became the basis of an article in the distinguished Edinburgh Evening Dispatch, entitled ‘Peterkin: A Marvel of Nature’:
‘Peterkin will be six years old by and by. … Circumstances have allowed me, his uncle, to see a good deal of Peterkin lately, and though we are now far parted, he has left an impression behind. …
‘Peterkin and I first realised that we were no common persons three weeks ago. His hammer, which has a habit of flying from his hand and making straight for any brittle article in its neighbourhood (when Peterkin immediately disappears), alighted on my head one evening. Then I arose in my wrath and addressed Peterkin in these words:–
Charlie Barrie, the original of Peterkin
‘“You thundering curmudgeon, get out of this, or I'll kick you round the room.”
‘Peterkin bolted, and I heard him clattering up the stairs. …
‘I returned to my work, and by and by Peterkin walked in with a look of importance on his face such as I had not seen since he first got hold of the hammer. I left him severely alone, but every time I looked up his eye was on me. He came and stood by my side, offering himself mutely for slaughter. Then he sat down on a chair by the fire, and presently I discovered that he was crying.
‘“What is the matter now?” I demanded fiercely.
‘“You said you would kick me round the room,” he moaned.
‘“Well, I won't do it,” I said, “if you are a good boy.”
‘“But you said you would do it.”
‘“You don't mean that you want it?”
‘“Ay, I want it. You said you would do't.”
‘Wondering, I arose and kicked him.
‘“Is that the way?” he cried in rapture.
‘“That's the way,” I said, returning to my chair.
‘“But,” he complained, “you said you would kick me right round the room.”
‘I got up again, and made a point of kicking him round the room.
‘“Kick harder!” he shouted, and so I kicked him into the lobby.
‘However desirous of gratifying Peterkin, I could not be always kicking him … and for the sake of peace I bribed quietness from him with the promise that I would kick him hard at eight o'clock. He now spent much of his valuable time gazing at the lobby clock, and counting the ticks—each of which he fondly believed meant a minute. …
‘Most people keep their distance from me, regarding me as morose and unsociable; but Peterkin thought he had found the key to me, and was convinced that I would not kick him so heartily if I did not consider him rather nice. He said that eight o'clock was longer in coming round than any other time of the day, and he frequently offered me chocolate to kick him in advance. …
‘He also thoroughly enjoys being tied with strings that leave their mark on him for days.
‘To-day Peterkin departed for his own home, in grief to a certain extent, but, on the whole, gladly. The fact is that he was burning to tell his various friends how I kicked him. …
‘Last night Peterkin drew from me a promise to get up early this morning and kick him just fearfully. Astonishing as it seems to myself, I would nowadays do anything in my power to oblige Peterkin, and at this moment I am confident he is black and blue. I turned him upside down six times as an extra farewell, swept the floor with his head, and doubled him up by flinging books at his waistcoat. He is, therefore, off in high spirits.
‘I told Peterkin that I would be glad to get rid of him; but the house has been very solemn since he left. At eight o'clock I felt quite strange and out of sorts, and at nine I was looking sadly at his hammer. In dark corners I trip over marbles that he has forgotten, and now and again my feet discover the cushions which he has left lying about in odd places. The lobby is deserted without any Peterkin waiting for eight p.m., and the clock, which used to strike eight differently from the other hours, has ceased to have any personal interest in the time of day.’8
* * *
‘Six feet three inches … If I had really grown to this it would have made a great difference in my life. I would not have bothered turning out reels of printed matter. My one aim would have been to become a favourite of the ladies which between you and me has always been my sorrowful ambition. The things I could have said to them if my legs had been longer. Read that with a bitter cry…’9
In his younger days, Barrie went a good way towards fulfilling that aim, particularly with pretty young actresses. As early as 1883, while working as a journalist in Nottingham, he fell for an actress called Minnie Palmer, who was appearing on tour in the local theatre. He was too shy to introduce himself without some pretext, so he quickly wrote her a one-act farce, Caught Napping, and took it round to her dressing-room; but when he came face to face with Minnie, he was overcome with nerves and could barely utter a word. Both the play and the author were turned down.
Although Barrie's early years in London were mainly occupied in journalism and his first novels, his interest in the theatre—and in actresses—had not diminished. In 1891 he collaborated with Marriott Watson on Richard Savage, in which another actress friend, Phyllis Broughton, appeared in its one and only performance. Two months later, Barrie tried his dramatic hand again with a parody on Ibsen's Hedda Gabier, entitled Ibsen's Ghost. The Illustrated London News, in reviewing the one-act play, noted that the author ‘is the most kindly and pungent satirist. He does not hit out hard and fell his antagonist. He dances round him, and digs him in the ribs.’
Ibsen's Ghost provided Barrie with his first critical stage success, albeit a minor one. It also allowed him to worship from afar yet another young actress, Irene Vanbrugh, who was to star in many of his subsequent plays. But once again their relationship amounted to little more than a mild flirtation. Several biographers, and numerous psychiatrists, have laid the blame for Barrie's inhibitions at his mother's feet, suggesting that she was excessively prudish and repressive in her views on sex. Certainly she was a religious woman, as were most of her Victorian contemporaries, but there is little to suggest that she was unduly puritanical. The Thrums novels abound in irreligious humour and amoral detail, yet there is no evidence to indicate that his mother was offended by them—indeed, she was exceedingly proud of her son's achievements.
Caricature of Irene Vanbrugh as Thea in Ibsen's Ghost
What, then, held him back? There is no certain answer, but there are possible clues in his notebooks. These entries were usually written in the third person, often relating to a character in a proposed article or novel:
— Bashful with women … He always wanted to kiss pretty girls tho' manner made him stiff with them—His reserve—How far his shyness is the real cause of all his weakness, got on with so few people that had to make much of the few. Thus missed flirting days of boyhood & they came later when he knew the world.
— He never has contact with a woman—If he had this might have made him exult less in making women love him.
— Had he even a genuine deep feeling that wasn't merely sentiment? Was he capable of it? Perhaps not.
— Perhaps the curse of his life that he never ‘had a woman’.
Irene Vanbrugh was again given the leading role in Barrie's second play, Walker, London, which went into rehearsal in the spring of 1892 under the direction of the actor-manager J. L. Toole, who had staged Ibsen's Ghost. The play was a light-weight comedy about an impostor posing as a man of substance. The cast called for a second leading lady, and Toole gave the part to one of the actresses in his company. But Barrie was dissatisfied. He asked his cricketing friend Jerome K. Jerome if he could suggest someone who was ‘young, beautiful, quite charming, a genius for preference, and able to flirt’.10 Jerome put forward Mary Ansell, an actress who ran her own touring company, but who was in London at the time, resting between engagements. Barrie went to meet her, and was once again swept off his feet. Without consulting Toole, he not only offered her the part, but promised her a higher fee than Irene Vanbrugh. Mary Ansell was delighted, Toole furious, Irene Vanbrugh indignant. But Barrie was adamant: ‘Miss Ansell plays the par-r-t,’ he growled. In her autobiography, Irene Vanbrugh later wrote: ‘Mary Ansell … was delightful and extremely pretty. I acknowledge this now more freely than I did at the time because I was jealous of her success; especially as the author was in love with her.’
Mary Ansell in an unidentified role
In reviewing Walker, London, the critics were as enthusiastic about J. M. Barrie the Playwright as their literary counterparts were about J. M. Barrie the Novelist. The Times predicted: ‘Like Rousseau, Mr Barrie may flatter himself that as no one has anticipated him, so he will have no imitator.’ Mary Ansell's performance was not singled out for special praise, but she had her consolation; to a young but not particularly talented actress, J. M. Barrie made an attractive proposition. The fact that he was not much over five foot didn't concern Mary: she was barely five foot herself. Barrie had always enjoyed the company of pretty actresses, and though Mary was no scintillating conversationalist, she was intelligent, albeit rather provincial, and had a keen perception of Barrie's dour sense of humour—an essential prerequisite in any relationship with or understanding of him. Many of his contemporaries found his erratic moods quite impossible to gauge. He could be exhilarating company when he wanted to be, witty and extrovert, yet at other times he would grace a dinner-table with the silence of the grave. Barrie himself gave no clues as to his mood. He rarely smiled, yet was for ever poking fun at everything that lay closest to his heart. But when to laugh with him, and when to sympathize, when to take him seriously and when to ignore him? Navigating his humour could be a hazardous affair.
Mary Ansell ‘peering over her fur collar’
Barrie's notebooks for the spring and summer of 1892 are crammed with observations about himself and Mary Ansell, ostensibly for a novel under the working title of ‘The Sentimentalist’:
— This sentimentalist wants to make girl love him, bullies and orders her (this does it) yet doesn't want to marry.
— Such a man if an author, wd be studying his love affair for book. Even while proposing, the thought of how it wd read wd go thro' him.
— Literary man can't dislike any one he gets copy out of.
— First, her independence, 2nd hates herself at feeling it go, 3rd proud to be his slave—Their talk of this—his pride in making her say she is his slave & he her master.
— Love Scenes Her abandonment of self to him—asking ‘Do you love me’ &c. Bursts of fondling him. ‘How I give myself away by showing how I love you—why am I so ridiculous &c. Yet I like to show I am yr slave—tho' my idea formerly of how things in love shd be was just the reverse.’
— She pretends doesn't want to marry him—really this cause of her doubts—she can't be sure he loves her.
— Her way of peering over her fur collar.
— Her ordering clothes for him, &c.—Motherly feelings.
— The girl when won't do what he tells her to do (knowing it wrong—he treating her like child) lies on floor with head on chair, twisting about in woe. … She makes him say he is her slave—then impulsively cries it is she who is his—she wants him to say he is because she knows he isn't. ‘I shd hate you really to be my slave—oh, say again that you are!’
— His feelings of repentance after making her act as slave to him.
— If she an actress, shd he not be a dramatist?
— His kindliness (weak), he feels for her & keeps the thing going on because doesn't want to make her miserable.
— The man reflecting in his own mind as to whether he shd marry her—pros and cons—his pleasures in mild love with many girls to which his position has at last given him an entrance, they admire his work so much—He feels absolutely that married life wd be insupportable & putting it to himself sees that he has many good points & ought not to give his future over to misery.
— He writes great book or play on this love affair of his, & the papers gush over its noble sentiment, &c, discuss the hero also, who is drawn unsparingly from himself, tho' they don't know this.
While Mary Ansell and Walker, London continued to play to packed houses, Barrie slipped away to visit his friend Arthur Quiller-Couch (‘Q.’) at Fowey in Cornwall. Sir Henry Irving had commissioned him to write a comedy for the Lyceum, and he liked to bounce ideas with Q.; he also relished the company of Q.'s three-year-old son, Bevil—‘my favourite boy in the wide wide world’. With Miss Ansell still on his mind, Barrie started to work on an idea about a Bookworm, which was to end up as The Professor's Love Story:
Barrie and Margaret Ogilvy in 1893
— BKWM [Bookworm] First act in writer's London study. Sister in Scotland. He is in woe, can't work, gets doctor who at first thinks it is a malady, then sees he is in love. Horror of Bookworm. ‘With whom?’ He has no idea, and doctor (who guesses it is A) won't tell. Alarm of Bookworm, change of life &c, packs to go off to sister in Scotland to fly from this woman, whoever she is.
Barrie himself went up to Scotland a week later—to visit his sister Maggie, who was engaged to a friend of the family, the Rev. James Winter. Barrie was particularly fond of this younger sister, with whom he had once hidden under the table that bore the coffin of his brother David: ‘No one could understand me much who did not know what she has been to me all her life.’11 Maggie was to be married at the end of May, so Barrie stayed with his parents in Kirriemuir until the wedding.
Both sides of Barrie's family were fiercely independent, and despite his new-found wealth, they would accept little from him; it was only after a good deal of persuasion that Margaret Ogilvy agreed to have a servant in the house, and even then she continued to do most of the work herself. But wedding presents were different, and Maggie's fiancé was happy to accept the gift of a horse from her brother. While preparations for the wedding continued, Barrie resumed his notes on the Bookworm:
Barrie and his mother at Strathview
— B[ookworm] realises he has been leading a selfish life engrossed in own work, &c, & not playing citizen's part in world.
— Doctor maintains … that B's marrying wd be the remaking of him—he has got so sunk in books, they'll drown him, he'll become a parchment, a mummy.
— Doctor says a sister can never be like a wife … Realising love better than books & fame.
— Strange after loved one's death to see papers again & see all world crying out ag[ain]st pinpricks—as we ourselves did but the other day, .& will do again.
This last note was entered on Barrie's 32nd birthday, after a telegram had arrived announcing that James Winter had been flung from his horse and killed. Maggie responded to the tragedy as her mother had done to the news of David's death: she took to her bed and refused to be comforted. Barrie was overcome with guilt; the horse had been his wedding present. He sat with his sister in her darkened room, brooding over the tragedy. But the journalist was ever at his elbow:
— Novel. After death, a character (à la Maggie) talks beautiful resignation, &c. Yet what is the feeling at heart? A kicking at the awfulness? A bitterness? Work this out in novel, showing how almost no one in these circumstances] gets at other's real feelings. Each conceals from the other.
A few days later, the wedding guests invited to attend James Winter's marriage attended his funeral; but his bride remained in the darkened room, wrapped in her grief, with Barrie at her side. He had written a four-page open letter, to be read out at the funeral service, explaining his sister's absence: ‘She has not physical strength to be with you just now in body, but she is with you in spirit, and God is near her, and she is not afraid. … God chose his own way, and took her Jim, her dear young minister, and she says, God's will be done.’12 Not content to limit his audience to the graveside mourners, Barrie proceeded to send this uncharacteristic piece of mawkishness to the British Weekly and the Pall Mall Gazette, both of whom published it in full. Perhaps it was done in an effort to comfort Maggie, who, unlike her brother, held deep religious beliefs. Barrie's truer feelings were reserved for the privacy of his notebook:
— A stone on road in memorial of the fatal accident might have awful words carried on it as—
Here was killed so & so,
Brave gallant man,
Knocked out of the world
by God
While doing his duty.
Left by his God to die
in a ditch.
God is love.
In the heat of the tragedy, Barrie had somewhat rashly promised to look after Maggie for the rest of her life. He was devoted to his sister, but nevertheless Maggie was a woman whose company was best enjoyed in small doses, and it must have come as something of a relief to him when she announced her engagement to her dead fiancé's brother, Willie Winter, in the following year. This too found its way into his notebook as grist for a possible story:
— Club Window Book. Girl's lover to whom about to be married dies. Her mother instrumental in getting her to marry another man. Yet in end it is seen secretly mother thinks daughter shd have remained virgin to old love & herself feels has shamed herself before old love's memory.
Barrie's engagement to Mary Ansell was now being confidently predicted in most of London's society magazines and gossip columns, but Barrie declined either to confirm or deny the rumours. He was caught in a cross-fire of conflicting emotions. On the one hand he was ‘in love’ with Mary—as much as he felt he was ever likely to be with a woman—and she was certainly in love with him. On the other hand he knew full well that he was temperamentally unsuited to married life. As early as 1887 he had contributed an article in black-comedy vein to the Edinburgh Evening Dispatch entitled ‘My Ghastly Dream’:
‘When this horrid nightmare got hold of me, and how, I cannot say, but it has made me the most unfortunate of men.
‘In my early boyhood it was a sheet that tried to choke me in the night. At school it was my awful bed-fellow with whom I wrestled nightly while all the other boys in the dormitory slept with their consciences at rest. It had assumed shape at that time: leering, but fatally fascinating; it was never the same, yet always recognisable. One of the horrors of my dream was that I knew how it would come each time, and from where. I do not recall it in my childhood, but they tell me that, asleep in my cot, I would fling my arms about wildly as if fighting a ghost. It would thus seem that my nightmare was with me even then, though perhaps only as a shapeless mass that a too lively imagination was soon to resolve into a woman. My weird dream never varies now. Always I see myself being married, and then I wake up with the scream of a lost soul, clammy and shivering. …
Margaret Ogilvy's only surviving letter to her son. They corresponded almost daily, and in Margaret Ogilvy Barrie wrote, ‘My thousand letters that she so carefully preserved, always sleeping with the last beneath the sheet, where one was found when she died – they are the only writing of mine of which I shall ever boast’
‘My ghastly nightmare always begins in the same way. I seem to know that I have gone to bed, and then I see myself slowly wakening up in a misty world. As I realise where I am the mist dissolves; and the heavy shapeless mass that weighed upon me in the night time when I was a boy, assumes the form of a woman, beautiful and cruel, with a bridal veil over her face. When I see her she is still a long way off, but she approaches rapidly. I cower in a corner till she glides into the room and beckons me to follow her. … Her power is mesmeric, for when she beckons I rise and follow her, shivering, but obedient. We seem to sail as the crow flies to the church which I attended as a child, and there everyone is waiting for us. …
One hideous night she came for me in a cart. I was seized hold of by invisible hands and flung into it. A horrible fear possessed me that I was being taken away to be hanged, and I struggled to escape. … My hands were bound together with iron chains, and as soon as I snapped them a little boy with wings forged another pair. Many a time when awake I have seen pictures of that little boy generally with arrows in his hands, one of which he is firing at some man or woman. In pictures he looks like a cherub who has over-eaten himself, but, ah, how terribly disfigured he is in my dreams! He is lean and haggard now, grown out of his clothes, and a very spirit of malignity. She drives the cart, laughing horribly as we draw nearer and nearer the church, while he sits behind me and occasionally jags me with an arrow. When I cry out in pain she turns and smiles upon him, and he laughs in gay response.’13
Mary Ansell at the time of her marriage
This hauntingly vivid premonition hardly boded well for marital bliss; yet despite his better judgement Barrie proposed to Mary Ansell, and she accepted. In his notebook he wrote:
— Morning after engagement, a startling thing to waken up & remember you're tied for life.
Barrie travelled up to Kirriemuir to break the news to his mother, but on his arrival he was almost immediately struck down with pleurisy and pneumonia, which left him with a permanent cough for the rest of his life. His illness was of national concern while his life hung in the balance. Mary Ansell quit the cast of Walker, London, and headed north to nurse her fiancé back to health. If Margaret Ogilvy harboured any doubts about her son marrying an actress, they were now swept aside by the spectacle of Mary's love and devotion. On July 1st, Barrie was able to write to Quiller-Couch:
‘My lungs are quite right again, and I have only to pick up strength now. Miss Ansell, who has an extraordinary stock of untrustworthy information on diseases of the human frame, knows all about quinsy and says she can sympathise in full. Yes, it is all true though it was in the papers. … We have worked hard to get married unbeknown to the lady journalists but vainly. In about a week it will be,—up here, so that we can go off together straight away, she to take charge. We go across the channel first for a month and fully mean to come your way soon thereafter.’
A rather different account of the prelude to the marriage was given by Hilaire Belloc's sister, the writer Marie Belloc Lowndes, in a letter to Mrs Thomas Hardy dated June 21st, 1937—two days after Barrie's death:
I was very intimate with a young woman, now long dead, who was Mary Ansell's beloved friend. As of course you know, all that about her nursing Barrie is rubbish. She refused to marry him many times. Then he fell ill at Kirriemuir, and his mother telegraphed to Mary who came and they were married on what was supposed to be his deathbed. He told all this to Mrs Oliphant who told me and my mother, just after she had seen him.’
Barrie at the time of his marriage
Whatever the truth, Mary Ansell accepted James Matthew Barrie as her husband on Monday July 9th, 1894. The ceremony was a simple affair, performed by a local minister in his parents' home, according to Scottish custom. After it was over, the newly-married couple left for their honeymoon in Switzerland. The ubiquitous notebooks went with them. Two days before the wedding, Barrie had jotted down in one of them:
— Our love has brought me nothing but misery.
— Boy all nerves. ‘You are very ignorant.’
— How? Must we instruct you in the mysteries of love-making?