James Matthew Barrie

 

James Matthew Barrie

 

James Matthew Barrie

 

Born into a family of low-income artisans, he had an unhappy childhood. The death of a brother, when he was barely six years old, profoundly altered family life and disrupted the mental health of his mother, who became an unbalanced, authoritarian and inflexible person, whose influence and memory weighed on James Barrie during the rest of his life. After becoming a famous writer, he himself would confess many times that his deepest wish would have been to recover the happy years of his early childhood, and that his most famous character, Peter Pan, was a personification of such longings. .

 

After studying at the University of Edinburgh and working for two years as a journalist, he moved to London, attracted by the brilliance of its cultural circles. In 1888 he successfully published The Idylls of Auld Licht, a series of evocations of peasant life in his hometown. Shortly afterwards, in 1889, A Window in Thrums nostalgically evoked that world again. In 1891 he had achieved fame thanks to his novels The Little Minister (1891), Margaret Ogilvy (1896), Sentimental Tommy (1896) and Tommy and Grizel (1900), delicate fusions of sentimentalism and ironic realism situated in the tradition of Dickens. but inspired by the texts of George Meredith, R. L. Stevenson and the great Russian authors.

 

To the theater, however, Barrie gave his most authentic works from 1900 (The Admirable Crichton, Street of the Great World). With him one of the most constant tones of the English spirit appeared manifested in delicate nuances: nostalgic melancholy in the form of "humour", perhaps the only original sentiment of J. M. Barrie's theater, otherwise quite eclectic (it came from both W. S. Gilbert and Oscar Wilde as George Bernard Shaw, Maurice Maeterlinck and the Russians).

 

In 1894, Barrie entered into an unhappy and early failed marriage to the actress Mary Ansell. Shortly after, in 1897, he began an intense love relationship with Sylvia Llewellyn Davies, a sentimental and affectionate woman with whose children he formed a true family. It was to those children that he began to tell various stories starring a character of his invention that symbolized the eternal childhood in which he himself would have liked to live: Peter Pan.

 

Some of those stories were published in 1902 in a volume titled The Little White Bird. Shortly after, in 1904, the comedy Peter Pan, the boy who never wanted to grow up, was released. Later, Barrie would publish Peter Pan in Kensington Park (1906) and Peter and Wendy (1911).

 

The success of his character and his adventures was instantaneous. Peter Pan and his adventure companions (little Wendy, John, Michael, the dog Nana, the fairy Tinker Bell, and the terrible Captain Hook) were adopted as heroes by many generations of children. everyone, familiar with his adventures through all kinds of translations and adaptations, some of them as celebrated as Herbert Brenon's film versions or Walt Disney's, in cartoons.

 

The character of Peter Pan provided Barrie with extraordinary celebrity; but his personal life was very often accompanied by misfortunes and misfortunes. In 1910 his marriage ended in divorce, and just four months later his partner Sylvia Davies, who had meanwhile been widowed, died; In addition, two of his lover's children, whom Barrie watched over as if he were a father, also died.

 

After the divorce, the vague legend was formed around the writer that presented him as an aged and sweetly disillusioned Peter Pan, with something of a wise man and a gnome, always with the taciturn pipe, carried by reality to a modest and gray peace. J. M. Barrie enjoyed a peaceful old age abundant in friendships and honors; but his dream world was transformed, until Dear Brutus (1917) and Mary Rose (1920), into another spectral and sad one, populated by impotent and painful ghosts, inhabitants of an arid, soulless and cruel reality.

 

How to cite this article:

Fernández, Tomás and Tamaro, Elena. «Biography of James Matthew Barrie». In Biographies and Lives. The online biographical encyclopedia [Internet]. Barcelona, Spain, 2004. Available at https://www.biografiasyvidas.com/biografia/b/barrie.htm [access date: March 23, 2024].

With affection,

Ruben