J. M.
Barrie
1860 –
1937
Biography
James Matthew
Barrie was
born at Kirriemuir in Forfarshire, the seventh child to David Barrie, a
hand-loom weaver, and Margaret Ogilvie, the daughter of a stone-mason.
Surviving on the income provided by declining weaving industry, the
Barries
were never wealthy and it is from his early childhood experiences as a
dweller
in the tenements that Barrie drew his sympathetic portraits of the
rural poor.
The death of
Barrie’s elder
brother David, when Barrie was just six years old, was to have a marked
effect
of his life and work. His mother never recovered from the loss of her
son, whom
Barrie perceived to be the favourite and whose place in his mother’s
affections
he strove to replace. The psychological significance of Barrie’s
relationship
with his mother and his need for maternal approval are apparent in the
uncritical, almost doting biography of her life which he published in
1896. The
exploration of feminine identity was to become a marked feature of
Barrie’s writing.
The experience of death in childhood would also influence Barrie’s
work, which
is constantly pre-occupied with the themes of exile, immortality and the
otherworldly.
Barrie’s was an
itinerant
youth. In 1868 he went to study for three years at Glasgow Academy
before
returning to Forfarshire where he attended the local school. Then, from
1873 he
spent his teenage years at Dumfries Academy before moving to Edinburgh
to
attend University at the age of 22. Barrie was unmoved by his University
experience and he derived his intellectual inspiration largely from the
theatre. Upon graduating he was already writing theatrical reviews, a
career
which eventually led him to London in 1885 where he would produce his
first
plays.
During the years
1888 –
1891 Barrie penned his first novels, the so-called ‘Thrums fiction’, the
fictional setting being based on his own native Kirriemuir and
depicting the
lives of the rural populations of west Scotland. In 1894 Barrie married
the
actress Mary Ansell, but the marriage was not to last. It was during
these
years too that Barrie’s friendship with the Llewellyn Davies family
inspired
his invention of the Peter Pan tales with which he delighted the Davies
children.
The period 1902 –
1921 were
to be Barrie’s most successful. During these years he produced no less
than ten
commercially successful plays. It was in 1904 that Barrie first staged
Peter
Pan, probably the best known of all his works, in London and New
York. In
his later life, Barrie was a wealthy man, popular in London society. He
was
bestowed with several honours including a baronet in 1913 and the Order
of
Merit in 1922. However, after 1920 Barrie claimed to have lost his
imaginative
inspiration and all but gave up writing except for his one final prose
masterpiece, Farewell Miss Julie Logan (1931). Although, he went
on to
explore some of his most intimate themes in his final, biblical drama
The
Boy David, which he believed to be his finest work. The play,
however, did
not attain the critical or commercial success of his earlier dramas and
was
abandoned after just fifty-five performances in London. In increasingly
ill
health and in a state of dejection that belied the critical success of
his
life, Barrie, in 1937, aged 77, died.
© http://www.bbc.co.uk/scotland/arts/writingscotland/writers/j_m_bar
rie/
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