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American Theater Guide:

James Matthew Barrie

Barrie, James M[atthew] (1860–1937), playwright. The English dramatist, who hid a barbed wit and slightly mocking view of life beneath often cloyingly sentimental surfaces, was first represented in America by The Professor's Love Story (1892) and Walker, London (1894). He was long associated with producer Charles Frohman and actress Maude Adams, an association that began with The Little Minister (1897). His subsequent successes included Quality Street (1901), The Admirable Crichton (1903) starring William Gillette, Peter Pan (1905), Alice Sit‐by‐the‐Fire (1905) with Ethel Barrymore, What Every Woman Knows (1908), A Kiss for Cinderella (1916), Dear Brutus (1918) with Gillette and Helen Hayes, and Mary Rose (1920). Barrymore toured in vaudeville for many years with his playlet The Twelve‐Pound Look, while Hayes later appeared in another short play, The Old Lady Shows Her Medals. Indeed, Hayes eventually became one of Barrie's leading advocates, appearing in revivals of several of his works, especially What Every Woman Knows, her curious blend of saccharine and iron precisely matching his.

 
 
Biography: Sir James Matthew Barrie

The British dramatist and novelist Sir James Matthew Barrie (1860-1937) is best known for his play "Peter Pan".

James M. Barrie was born in Kirriemuir, Angus, Scotland, on May 9, 1860, the son of a poor, hardworking weaver. Influenced by his mother's interest in literature and art, the ambitious Barrie studied at the University of Edinburgh and then wrote prolifically for a Nottingham newspaper for two years. Determined to earn his living as a writer, he moved to London.

After achieving literary success, Barrie married the actress Mary Ansell in 1894. Their childless union was perhaps marred by the influence of his mother, and they were divorced in 1910. During this period he had become attached to Sylvia Llewellyn Davies and her sons. The tragic death of Mrs. Davies in 1910 hardened the heretofore lighthearted writer. He was further grieved by the accidental deaths of Mrs. Davies's two sons, whose guardian he had been.

Barrie received many honors in his lifetime. He was made a baronet in 1913 and was granted the Order of Merit for his service during World War I. He died in London on June 19, 1937, and was buried at Kirriemuir.

His Works

Like his immortal Peter Pan, Barrie never wanted to face the pain and unhappiness of the adult world. Thus much of his writing is emotionally sentimental as well as thematically autobiographical. His first published fiction, Auld Licht Idylls (1888), is a collection of folktales set in "Thrums, " a town based on Kirriemuir. These stories and his novel The Little Minister (1891) found immediate acceptance.

His play The Professor's Love Story (1894) and the dramatization of The Little Minister (1897) proved so successful that Barrie decided to concentrate on writing for the theater. He did, however, continue to produce outstanding prose works, among them Margaret Ogilvy (1897), which was a biography of his mother. The character of the hardworking "little mother" evident in this work recurs in several of his plays and novels.

Barrie's reputation as a dramatist was firmly established with productions of Quality Street (1901) and The Admirable Crichton (1902); both works possess charm and easy grace. Peter Pan, his greatest success, was based on a story created for Mrs. Davies's sons. The drama promptly became a classic following its initial performance in 1904. The character of Wendy in this play appears to be an amalgam of Barrie's mother and Mrs. Davies.

In his social comedies - The Admirable Crichton and What Every Woman Knows (1908) - Barrie satirizes a topsy-turvy society whose class structure is rigid and antiquated. The Twelve-Pound Look (1910) criticizes feminine emancipation, and Dear Brutus (1917) advocates heavenly failure over worldly success. Mary Rose (1920), while light on the surface, has an underlying cynical vein.

Further Reading

The authorized biography of Barrie is Denis MacKail, Barrie, the Story of J.M.B. (1941). Also see Janet Dunbar, J. M. Barrie: The Man behind the Image (1970).

Additional Sources

Allen, David (David Rayvern), Peter Pan & cricket, London: Constable, 1988.

Birkin, Andrew., J. M. Barrie & the lost boys: the love story that gave birth to Peter Pan, New York: C. N. Potter: distributed by Crown Publishers, 1979.

Darlington, William Aubrey, J. M. Barrie, New York: Haskell House, 1974.

Darton, F. J. Harvey (Frederick Joseph Harvey), J. M. Barrie, New York: Haskell House, 1974.

Hammerton, John Alexander, Sir, J. M. Barrie and his books; biographical and critical studies, New York: Haskell House Publishers, 1974.

 
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: Sir James Matthew Barrie

(born May 9, 1860, Kirriemuir, Angus, Scot. — died June 19, 1937, London, Eng.) Scottish playwright and novelist. After moving to London, he wrote Auld Licht Idylls (1888), a book about his native Scotland. His best-selling novel The Little Minister (1891) was made into a play in 1897. His plays Quality Street (1901) and The Admirable Crichton (1902) ran successfully in London. After creating the stories of Peter Pan for a friend's sons, he won great success with his classic children's play Peter Pan, the Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up (1904). His other plays include The Twelve-Pound Look (1910) and Dear Brutus (1917).

For more information on Sir James Matthew Barrie, visit Britannica.com.

 
Fairy Tale Companion: Sir James Matthew Barrie

Barrie, Sir James Matthew (1860–1937), Scottish creator of Peter Pan. He studied at the University of Edinburgh (of which he would become Chancellor in 1930) and was a journalist before freelancing in London. His first novel inspired the ‘Kailyard’ school with its quaint sentimentality, Scots dialect, and local colour. His material came from reminiscences of his mother, who never overcame the death of her eldest son, whom Barrie sought to replace. Critics find an intricate Oedipal relationship reflected in his novels and plays with fantasy settings, character definition, problematic marriages, and manipulative women. Sentimentality and portrayal of contemporary society especially date his theatre, which has been labelled ‘childish’ and inferior to the social comedies or intellectual dramas of contemporaries like Wilde or Shaw.

It was precisely this naïve quality, however, that charmed the public. Literary success arrived with the melodramatic novel The Little Minister (1891); Walker, London (1892) was his first theatrical triumph, and featured Barrie's future wife. Unfortunately, their marriage was childless, and he looked elsewhere for a surrogate family. He found one in the five Llewelyn Davies brothers, to whom he became extraordinarily attached. He regaled them with tales later collected for The Little White Bird (1902), an adult story about a bachelor who tries to charm a youngster away from his parents with tales of a boy who could fly. Barrie refashioned these episodes into a fairy play—and the rest is history.

Peter Pan, or The Boy who Wouldn't Grow Up (1904), was a phenomenon and remains—with his social‐caste fantasy, The Admirable Crichton (1903)—one of the few Barrie plays still performed. With the advent of television and improved theatrical effects, it easily outdistances rival children's plays like The Blue Bird and Toad of Toad Hall. Peter, the fairy Tinkerbell, and Captain Hook were popularized by countless authors, and had entered modern British folklore long before Barrie received a baronetcy (1913) or the Order of Merit (1922). Although he issued an illustrated version of the White Bird episodes as Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens (1906), he did not produce the narrative Peter and Wendy until 1911, and only published his play's definitive version in 1928.

None of his later theatre was as popular as this paean to Eternal Youth. He did, however, re‐enter fairyland with A Kiss for Cinderella (1916). Set in wartime London, it concerns a girl nicknamed Cinderella who does drudge's work for a German family, runs an illegal daycare service, and dreams of accompanying the Duke of Wales to a ball. A magical pantomime recreates the ball that she hallucinates attending, all but freezing to death on her doorstep. Unlike Andersen's Little Match Girl, though, she catches pneumonia and receives a kiss from her Prince before dying. In short, where the fantasy of Peter Pan is life‐affirming, that of Cinderella is destructive.

Bibliography

  • Birkin, Andrew, J. M. Barrie & The Lost Boys: The Love Story That Gave Birth to Peter Pan (1979).
  • Dunbar, Janet, J. M. Barrie: The Man behind the Image (1970).
  • Geduld, Harry M., James Barrie (1971).

— Mary Louise Ennis

 
Columbia Encyclopedia: Barrie, J. M.
(Sir James Matthew Barrie) (bâr'ē), 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).

 
Quotes By: Sir James M. Barrie

Quotes:

"Dreams do come true, if we only wish hard enough, You can have anything in life if you will sacrifice everything else for it."

"We are all failures -- at least, all the best of us are."

"Ambition -- it is the last infirmity of noble minds."

"The secret of happiness is not in doing what one likes, but in liking what one does."

"Heaven for climate, Hell for company."

"You must have been warned against letting the golden hours slip by. Yes, but some of them are golden only because we let them slip."

See more famous quotes by Sir James M. Barrie

 
Wikipedia: J. M. Barrie
Sir James Matthew Barrie, Bt., Scottish author
Enlarge
Sir James Matthew Barrie, Bt., Scottish author

Sir James Matthew Barrie, 1st Baronet, OM (9 May 186019 June 1937), more commonly known as J. M. Barrie, was a Scottish novelist and dramatist. He is best remembered for creating Peter Pan, the boy who refused to grow up, whom he based on his friends, the Llewelyn Davies boys. He is also credited with the creation of the name "Wendy", which was non-existent in either Britain or America before he gave it to the heroine of Peter Pan. He was made a baronet in 1913; his baronetcy was not inherited.

Childhood and adolescence

Barrie was born to a family of Scottish weavers in Kirriemuir, Angus, the ninth child of ten. When he was six, his brother David, his mother's favourite, died in a skating accident on the eve of his 14th birthday. His mother never recovered from the loss, and ignored the young Barrie. One time he entered her room, and heard her say "Is that you?" "I thought it was the dead boy she was speaking to," wrote Barrie in his biographical account of his mother, Margaret Ogilvy (1896), "and I said in a little lonely voice, 'No, it's no' him, it's just me.'" Barrie's mother found comfort in the fact that her dead son would remain a boy forever, never to grow up and leave her. This had a profound impact on Barrie: he never grew much beyond five foot, and some authors have speculated that Peter Pan was inspired by the traumatic events of his own childhood. At the age of 13, Barrie was sent away to boarding school at Dumfries Academy. Here he and his friends spent time in the garden of Moat Brae house, playing pirates "in a sort of Odyssey that was long afterwards to become the play of Peter Pan".

Barrie was educated at the Glasgow Academy, Forfar Academy and Dumfries Academy, and the University of Edinburgh.

Literary career

Peter Pan statue in Kensington Gardens, London
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Peter Pan statue in Kensington Gardens, London

Barrie became a journalist in Nottingham, then London, and turned to writing novels and subsequently plays. He set his first novels in his birthplace of Kirriemuir, which he referred to as "Thrums". Barrie often wrote dialogue in Scots. His Thrums novels were hugely successful: Auld Licht Idylls (1888), A Window in Thrums (1889)[1], and The Little Minister (1891). His two "Tommy" novels, Sentimental Tommy (1896) and Tommy and Grizel (1902), dealt with themes much more explicitly related to those that would appear in Peter Pan. The first appearance of Peter came in The Little White Bird (1901).

Barrie also wrote a number of works for the theatre, beginning with Ibsen's Ghost (1891), a parody of Henrik Ibsen's drama Ghosts, which had just been performed for the first time in England under the Independent Theatre Society, led by J. T. Grein. Barrie's play was first performed on May 31 at Toole's Theatre in London. Barrie seemed to appreciate Ibsen's merits; even William Archer, the translator of Ibsen's works into English, enjoyed the humour of the play and recommended it to others. Barrie also authored the flop, Jane Annie (1893), which he begged his friend Arthur Conan Doyle to revise and finish, when he suffered the first of his many nervous breakdowns. Notable successes included Quality Street (1901) and The Admirable Crichton (1902).

Barrie's most famous and enduring work, Peter Pan, had its first stage performance on December 27 1904. In 1929 he specified that the copyright of the play should go to the nation's leading children's hospital, Great Ormond Street Hospital in London. The current status of the copyright is complex. Later plays included What Every Woman Knows (1908). His final play was The Boy David (1936), which dramatized the Biblical story of King Saul and the young David. Like the role of Peter Pan, that of David was played by a woman, Elisabeth Bergner.

Barrie, along with a number of other playwrights, was involved in the 1909 and 1911 attempts to challenge the censorship of the theatre by the Lord Chamberlain.

Acquaintances

Barrie traveled in high literary circles, and had many famous friends. With Arthur Conan Doyle he wrote a failed musical. With Robert Louis Stevenson he conducted a long correspondence, but the two never met in person. George Bernard Shaw was for several years his neighbor, and once participated in a Western that Barrie scripted and filmed. Jerome K. Jerome introduced Barrie to his wife; H. G. Wells was a friend of many years. J.M. Barrie met Thomas Hardy through Hugh Clifford while he was staying in London. Conan Doyle, Jerome, Wells and other luminaries such as G. K. Chesterton and A. A. Milne also occasionally played cricket with a team founded by Barrie for his friends, the "Allahakbarries" (the name was chosen under the mistaken belief that "Allah akbar" means "God save us" in Arabic; in fact it means "God is great").

Barrie also befriended Antarctic explorer Robert Falcon Scott and was one of the seven recipients of letters that Scott wrote in the final hours of his life. He was godfather to Robert's son, Peter.[2] Another close friend of Barrie's, theater producer Charles Frohman, who was responsible for the debut of Peter Pan' in both England and the U.S., died famously, declining a lifeboat seat when the RMS Lusitania was sunk by a German U-boat in the North Atlantic. Frohman reportedly paraphrased Peter Pan's final line from the stage play, "To die will be an awfully big adventure."

On several occasions he met and told stories to the little girls who would become Queen Elizabeth II and her younger sister Princess Margaret.

The Llewelyn Davies family

The Llewelyn Davies family consisted of the parents Arthur (1863–1907) and Sylvia, née du Maurier (1866–1910) (daughter of George du Maurier), [married the 3Q of 1892 in Hampstead, London: GROMI: vol. 1a, p. 1331]; and their five sons George (1893–1915), John (1894-1959), Peter (1897–1960), Michael (1900–1921), and Nicholas (1903–1980).

Barrie became acquainted with the family in 1897 or 1898 after meeting George and Jack with their nurse (i.e. nanny) Mary Hodgson in London's Kensington Gardens. He lived nearby and often walked his dog Porthos in the park. He did not meet Sylvia until a chance encounter at a dinner party brought them into social contact. He became a regular visitor at the Davies household and a common companion to the woman and her boys, despite the fact that he and she were each married. Barrie's marriage to the actress Mary Ansell was reportedly a sexless one, and childless; she had an affair with another man and it ended in divorce, highly unusual and stigmatised in those times.

When Arthur Llewelyn Davies died, "Uncle Jim" became even more involved in the boys' lives, and provided financial support to the family. (His income from Peter Pan and other works was easily adequate to provide for them.) Following Sylvia's death a few years later, Barrie claimed that they had been engaged to be married. Her will indicated nothing to that effect, but specified her wish to have Barrie be trustee and guardian to the boys, along with her mother, her brother Guy Du Maurier, and Arthur Llewelyn Davies' brother Compton. When copying the will informally for Sylvia's family, Barrie inserted himself in an additional paragraph: Sylvia had written that she would like Mary Hodgson, the boys' nurse, to continue taking care of them, and that perhaps "Jenny" (Mary's sister) could come help; Barrie wrote "Jimmy" (Sylvia's nickname for him) instead of "Jenny". Although Barrie and Hodgson did not get along well, they served as surrogate parents until the boys were all in school and Jack was married. (Birkin, p. 194)

Although there has always been suspicion about Barrie's friendship with children (the Davies boys especially), there is no evidence that anything inappropriate happened, and Nico, the youngest of the brothers, flatly denied that Barrie ever behaved inappropriately. (Birkin, p. 130)

The statue of Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, erected in secret overnight for May Morning in 1912, was supposed to be modeled upon photographs of Michael dressed as Peter Pan. However, the sculptor decided to use a different child as a model, leaving Barrie very disappointed with the result. "It doesn't show the devil in Peter", he said. (Birkin, p. 202)

Barrie suffered bereavements with the boys, losing the two to whom he was closest. George was killed in action (1915) in World War I. Michael, with whom Barrie corresponded daily, drowned (1921) at a known danger-spot at Oxford, one month short of his 21st birthday. It was speculated that the drowning was a possible suicide pact with his friend and possible lover Rupert Erroll Victor Buxton. Some years after Barrie's death, Peter Davies, later a publisher, wrote his Morgue, which contains much family information and comments on Barrie.

Works

Barrie's most famous and best loved work is undoubtedly his play Peter Pan, or the Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up, performed innumerable times since 1904, adapted by Barrie into a novel, and adapted into three feature films. The story is the classic tale of the child that does not want to grow up and Barrie clearly felt that it was, in part, the condition of humanity to feel always in exile from the innocence and freedoms of childhood. The societal constraints of middle-class domestic reality are enacted in the Bloomsbury scenes while the Never-Land is a world free of these Victorian social constraints, a world in which sexuality and morality are crucially ambivalent.

From this point of view, the familial nucleus represented by the Darling Children acts as a metaphor for social order and stability while Peter and the Lost Boys exist without parental (and by implication societal) control. The brutish pirate scenes, in which the Darling Boys indulge with relish (although Peter himself also indulges, and is both infantile and devilish) are the embodiment of anarchic disorder and in this way represent the innate, but repressed, desire for social deviance. Similarly, Wendy can be regarded as the epitome of ‘the good wife and mother’, a role which is playfully challenged by the more flirtatious and untamed Tinker Bell in the parallel dimension of Never Land. George Bernard Shaw’s description of the play as ‘ostensibly a holiday entertainment for children but really a play for grown-up people’, suggests his understanding of the deeper social allegories at work in Peter Pan.

Perhaps the best known, though by no means the finest, of Barrie’s fictional output are his early Thrums stories, Auld Licht Idylls (1888), A Window in Thrums (1889) and The Little Minister (1891). Literary criticism of these works has been unfavourable, tending to disparage these early writings as sentimental and nostalgic depictions of a parochial Scotland far from the realities of the industrialised nineteenth century. Criticism has perhaps judged these early works too harshly. For one thing, regionalism was in fashion at the turn of the century, as exemplified in the fiction of Thomas Hardy and George Elliot. Moreover, Barrie’s descriptions of humble life are acutely observed and the painstaking detail he devotes to describing the conditions in which the rural poor lived offsets some of the more idealised and romantic characterisations and plots. The Thrums tales do not ignore the problems of alcoholism and temptations of adultery in lives characterised by boredom, monotony and poverty.

Works include the play "Dear Brutus".

Death

Barrie lies buried at Kirriemuir next to his parents and one sister and brother.

Biographical articles

  • The Story of J.M.B. by Sewell Stokes, Theatre Arts, Vol.XXV No.11, New York: Theatre Arts Inc, Nov 1941, pp 845-848.

Film biographies

J. M. Barrie
Enlarge
J. M. Barrie

The BBC made an award-winning miniseries by Andrew Birkin, The Lost Boys (also titled J.M. Barrie and the Lost Boys), in 1978, starring Ian Holm as Barrie and Ann Bell as Sylvia. It is considered factual, includes Arthur Llewelyn Davies (Tim Piggot-Smith), and confronts the issue of Barrie's affection for the Davies boys. The DVD is available in both the UK and USA.

A semi-fictional movie about his relationship with the family, Finding Neverland, was released in November 2004, starring Johnny Depp as Barrie and Kate Winslet as Sylvia Llewelyn Davies. It omits Arthur and Nico.

Footnotes

  1. ^ J. M. Barrie. A Window in Thrums. Project Gutenberg.
  2. ^ Chaney, Lisa. Hide-and-Seek with Angels - A Life of J. M. Barrie, London: Arrow Books, 2005

References

  • Birkin, Andrew: J. M. Barrie & the Lost Boys (Contables, 1979; revised edition, Yale University Press, 2003)

External links

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Academic offices
Preceded by
Field Marshall Sir Douglas Haig
Rector of the University of St Andrews
1919 - 1922
Succeeded by
Rudyard Kipling
Preceded by
Earl of Balfour
Chancellor of the University of Edinburgh
1930 – 1937
Succeeded by
Baron Tweedsmuir


British Children's and Young Adults' Literature (1900-1949)
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Copyrights:

American Theater Guide. The Oxford Companion to American Theatre. Copyright © 2004 by Oxford University Press, Inc. All rights reserved.  Read more
Biography. © 2006 through a partnership of Answers Corporation. All rights reserved.  Read more
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. © 2006 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. All rights reserved.  Read more
Fairy Tale Companion. The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales. Copyright © 2000, 2002, 2005 by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.  Read more
Columbia Encyclopedia. The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition Copyright © 2003, Columbia University Press. Licensed from Columbia University Press. All rights reserved. www.cc.columbia.edu/cu/cup/  Read more
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Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "J. M. Barrie" Read more

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From Today's Highlights
May 7, 2006

To die will be an awfully big adventure.
- Sir James Matthew Barrie, said to be quoted by Barrie's friend Charles Frohman as he plunged to his death on the Lusitania.

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