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What kind of man creates a boy who never grows up? More than 100 years after Peter Pan first appeared on the London stage, author J. M. Barrie remains one of the most complex and enigmatic figures in modern literature. A few facts, of course, are widely known: Peter Pan made Barrie the richest author of his time, and he bequeathed the royalties to the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children. He was married, but later divorced, and he was devoted to the orphaned sons of Sylvia Llewelyn Davies, one of whom was named Peter. And then the rumors begin--about the nature of his marriage; about his precise relationship with the Davies boys, whose guardian he became; about the fantasies and demons that determined his achievements.
In this brilliant biography, Lisa Chaney goes beyond the myths to discover the fascinating, frequently misunderstood man behind the famous boy. James Matthew Barrie was born in a village in Scotland in 1860, the ninth of 10 children of a linen-weaver and his wife. When James was six years old, his older brother died in a skating accident, and his mother began her withdrawal into grief. It is not an exaggeration to say that Barrie's entire life--both his professional triumphs as a writer and his personal tragedies--led up to the creation of Peter Pan, the play where "all children except one grow up." As Lisa Chaney explores Barrie's own struggles to grow up, she deepens our understanding both of his most famous character and of the complex relationship between life and art.
- Sales Rank: #697748 in Books
- Published on: 2006-06-27
- Released on: 2006-06-27
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.50" h x 1.25" w x 6.45" l,
- Binding: Hardcover
- 432 pages
From Booklist
Obsessed with time and mortality, James Barrie created in Peter Pan a myth with enduring, worldwide appeal. Chaney thoughtfully examines Barrie's inner life from childhood in Kirriemuir, Scotland, to wild, international success. She describes young James as unexceptional, small for his age, but "cheerful enough," though not much was expected of him. When beloved elder brother David died accidentally, James perfected David's mannerisms and wore his clothes to assuage his grieving mother--unsuccessfully. Even that early, he was a natural storyteller who needed to perform and make himself visible. But when he announced he wanted to be a writer, his parents were flabbergasted. Later, after Barrie moved to London and achieved fame and fortune, Kirriemuir represented for him all that was good and wholesome, and he returned to it again and again. Chaney discusses Barrie's work (many successful novels and plays), ill-fated marriage, complex mother-son relationship, friendship with Sylvia Llewelyn Davies and her sons, and the origins and evolution of his masterpiece so as to bring to life a most complicated, enigmatic, and melancholy man. June Sawyers
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
"An excellent new biography."
--A.S. Byatt
About the Author
LISA CHANEY has lectured and tutored in the history of art and literature, and has written for journals and newspapers, including the Sunday Times, The Spectator and the Guardian.
Most helpful customer reviews
21 of 21 people found the following review helpful.
a satisfying life of an underrated author
By Paul Britton
After I've gotten to know an author, I generally get the urge to find out whether his life matches up with my notions. Thus, the publication of Lisa Chaney's "A Life of James Barrie" was especially timely for me, since I've been systematically working through Barrie's novels and plays over the last couple of years. I wish it hadn't taken me so long to become aware of his body of work.
Barrie's importance stretches far beyond "Peter Pan," and Chaney gives due attention to other stages of his life and to his many other literary and dramatic successes. She falls occasionally into amateur psychoanalysis, but Barrie was so eccentric that I can hardly blame her. Her prose is straightforward and does not distract (although her book contains a surprising number of spelling errors, mostly the sort of thing that spellcheck programs don't pick up, like "it's" versus "its"). Her biography of this literary craftsman is more than satisfying.
I was pleased to learn from Chaney about Barrie's friendships with Thomas Hardy and other luminaries like Arthur Conan Doyle, R. L. Stevenson, H. G. Wells, and George Meredith. However, Chaney makes little effort to relate Barrie's work to that of his contemporaries, other than to contrast "Peter Pan" with other prominent works of children's literature. There was surely more to be said; personally, I could not help linking Barrie's early "A Window in Thrums," a book of tender episodes in the lives of rustic Scots, to Hardy's "Under the Greenwood Tree," an episodic early novel containing affectionate portrayals of English rustics. And given their friendship, was it coincidence that Hardy abandoned novel-writing for poetry about the same time that Barrie abandoned novel-writing for drama?
By the time of his last novel, "The Little White Bird," Barrie had achieved a degree of control over language and tone that, in my view, would be surpassed only by E. M. Forster and P. G. Wodehouse. He had an ear for dialect to rival Hardy's. The half-dozen best of his ingenious and felicitous plays, gems like "The Admirable Crichton" and "What Every Woman Knows," not to mention "Peter Pan," will last as long as Shaw's. J. M. Barrie is an underrated writer, and this biography was well merited.
23 of 25 people found the following review helpful.
"The Puppet Master In Control"
By The Wingchair Critic
Lisa Chaney's excellent, insightful 'Hide-And-Seek with Angels: A Life of J. M. Barrie' (2005) offers readers a broader view of the Scottish writer's life than can be found in Andrew Birkin's classic 'J. M. Barrie & the Lost Boys: The Love Story That Gave Birth To Peter Pan' (1979). Though Barrie's obsessive relationship with the Llewelyn Davies boys is not the primary focus of Chaney's biography, the physically unassuming Barrie is, over the course of the biography, nonetheless exposed as having been a domineering, shrewd, and deceitful arch-manipulator who cloaked his motives and emotional neediness in financial generosity and elaborate, ostensibly good manners.
Despite Barrie's many novelistic and theatrical achievements, and the fact that he was a self-made man of modest origin, the question of Barrie's divided, willful, and often poisonous character dominates his life story; though in time Barrie came to be seen as a noble being in the eyes of the masses ("the British public had long since taken him to their heart...he could meet anyone he choose, anything he did was news, and the honors continued to be awarded"), much of his personal behavior reflects differently on this estimation.
Though Chaney astutely examines the social and sexual mores of Victorian and Edwardian England, which she contrasts with those of the present day, and doesn't find Barrie's behavior towards the Llewelyn Davies boys intrinsically suspicious, Chaney's emphasis on overt sexual desire and genital contact perhaps misses the point. Though no hard evidence that Barrie was actively pedophiliac exists, it is possible that Barrie was pedophiliac by nature, even if he never acted upon his desires with the Llewelyn Davies boys or any others. Some unusual, perhaps abnormal, psychic factor certainly fueled his ambitions where the family was concerned.
Thought simply asexual by many--and with good reason, since his marriage to actress Mary Ansell was never consummated--Barrie smoothly insinuated himself into the daily lives of the Llewelyn Davies family, even though he knew his smothering presence was resented, to varying degrees and at different periods, by husband and father Arthur, and sons Jack and Peter.
The truth is that Barrie didn't care whether or not he was unwanted, initially or thereafter. Year after year, he slowly took control of the family wherever and whenever he saw an opportunity, until the boy's lives were almost completely under his management. Revealing the same kind of telling disrespect to mother Sylvia after her death that he showed to father Arthur in life, Barrie even went to far as to deceitfully alter a copy of Sylvia's will to give extended family members the impression that he was the party Sylvia had selected to become the children's guardian after her passing.
Though Barrie obviously bore no responsibility for the cancer that killed both Arthur and Sylvia early in their lives, nor for son George's death in World War One, Barrie may have played an indirect role in the death of favorite boy Michael, who, as a young man, drowned with a friend at Oxford in what may have been a homosexual suicide pact (brother Peter committed suicide at 63). The handsome, sensitive Michael loved Barrie, but had begun to resent Barrie's almost total control over his life. Since childhood, Michael had suffered from terrible nightmares (that were often assuaged by a vigilant Barrie), which may very well have been an unconscious response to "Uncle Jim's" slow, methodical, and passive-aggressive takeover of his family and usurpation of patriarch Arthur's role. If at any time Michael suffered from doubt, confusion, and fear about the nature of his sexuality, Barrie's particular brand of affection may only have exacerbated those feelings.
Chaney's own theory, that Barrie, "in that peculiar shelter between the conscious and the unconscious" desperately melded Michael with his memories of himself from his own emotionally troubled childhood, also reflects a grasping attachment that Michael may have intuitively sensed as parasitic. Unsurprisingly, later in their lives, both Jack and Peter expressed their view that Barrie's strange, far-reaching influence on their family was intrusive at best and unwholesome, perhaps even baleful, at worst.
As fate would have it, final happiness with the Llewelyn Davies family eluded Barrie, and the tragic events of all of their lives meant that Barrie lost early the three members that he loved most dearly--Sylvia, George, and Michael--while the relatively unfavored sons--Jack, Peter, and Nicholas--oddly enough--married, had children, and lived well into adulthood.
8 of 9 people found the following review helpful.
The Power of Belief
By Philip W. Henry
Hide-and-Seek With Angels: A life of J.M. Barrie
By Lisa Chaney
J.M. Barrie was an extraordinary man who lived in extraordinary times. Although he is remembered largely for his classic story of childhood and belief, Peter Pan,¨ he was one of the leading literary lights at a time when giants like Robert Louis Stevenson, Kipling, Arthur Conan Doyle, George Bernard Shaw, and H.G. Wells dominated British literature.
Stevenson wrote from Samoa that Henry James, Kipling and Barrie were his "muses."
Barrie was enormously successful as a playwright, amassing a fortune which he bequeathed, characteristically, to a children's hospital.
But his life was marked by tragedy: the premature death of his sister, his friend George Meredith, and a failed and likely unconsummated marriage. In her excellent biography,
"Hide and Seek with Angels," Lisa Chaney examines Barrie's childhood with a domineering mother and a wimpy father (and we all know what that leads to); his education; first attempts at literature, and strange affection for children. Barrie was complex: sometimes charming, sometimes aloof and threatening; confusing and perplexing.
Not having read Andrew Birkin's "JM Barrie and The Lost Boys" (it's not in our library system), I can't compare the two books. But Barrie's obsessive relationship with the orphaned boys...which continued through their adolence... is touched on although not excessively.
"Herein lies the profound difference between Barrie and the other great writers for children. All of them --Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll, Rudyard Kipling, Kenneth Grahame, Beatrix Potter, Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Roald Dahl--no matter how subversive
or anarchic their worlds, wrote stories that include the idea of negotiating with and becoming adult. No matter how impious or irreverent, they all acknowledge time. But in Peter Pan it is unavoidably clear that at the deepest level Barrie¡¦s little hero refuses to grow up. He fears the very qualities of adulthood, and this is Barrie¡¦s dilemma.¡¨
(Hide and Seek with Angels,P. 237)
Hide and Seek With Angels¡ is a remarkably complete, well-researched, and well- presented biography of a difficult subject.
*****
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