Barrie knew that he wished to follow a career as an author; however, his family attempted to persuade him to choose a profession such as the ministry. With advice from Alexander, he was able to work out a compromise of attending a university, but studying literature. Barrie enrolled at the
University of Edinburgh where he wrote drama reviews for the
Edinburgh Evening Courant. He graduated and obtained an M.A. on 21 April 1882. Following a job advertisement found by his sister in
The Scotsman, he worked for a year and a half as a staff journalist on the
Nottingham Journal. Back in Kirriemuir, he submitted a piece to the ''St. James's Gazette'', a London newspaper, using his mother's stories about the town where she grew up (renamed "Thrums"). The editor "liked that Scotch thing" so well that Barrie ended up writing a series of these stories. and
The Little Minister (1891). The stories depicted the "Auld Lichts", a strict religious sect to which his grandfather had once belonged. Modern literary criticism of these early works has been unfavourable, tending to disparage them as sentimental and nostalgic depictions of a parochial Scotland, far from the realities of the industrialised 19th century, seen as characteristic of what became known as the
Kailyard School. Despite, or perhaps because of, this, they were popular enough at the time to establish Barrie as a successful writer. Following that success, he published
Better Dead (1888) privately and at his own expense, but it failed to sell. His two "Tommy" novels,
Sentimental Tommy (1896) and
Tommy and Grizel (1900), were about a boy and young man who clings to childish fantasy, with an unhappy ending. The English novelist
George Gissing read the former in November 1896 and wrote that he "thoroughly dislike[d it]". Meanwhile, Barrie's attention turned increasingly to works for the theatre, beginning with a biography of
Richard Savage, written by Barrie and
H. B. Marriott Watson; it was performed only once and critically panned. He immediately followed this with ''Ibsen's Ghost
, or Toole Up-to-Date'' (1891), a
parody of
Henrik Ibsen's dramas
Hedda Gabler and
Ghosts.
Ghosts had been unlicensed in the UK until 1914, but had created a sensation at the time from a single "club" performance. The production of ''Ibsen's Ghost'' at
Toole's Theatre in London was seen by
William Archer, the translator of Ibsen's works into English. Apparently comfortable with the parody, he enjoyed the humour of the play and recommended it to others. Barrie's third play
Walker, London (1892) resulted in his being introduced to a young actress named Mary Ansell. He proposed to her and they were married on 9 July 1894. Barrie bought her a
Saint Bernard puppy, Porthos, who played a part in the 1902 novel
The Little White Bird. He used Ansell's first name for many characters in his novels. Barrie also authored
Jane Annie, a
comic opera for
Richard D'Oyly Carte (1893), which failed; he persuaded
Arthur Conan Doyle to revise and finish it for him. In 1901 and 1902, he had back-to-back successes;
Quality Street was about a respectable, responsible
old maid who poses as her own flirtatious niece to try to win the attention of a former suitor returned from the war.
The Admirable Crichton was a critically acclaimed social commentary with elaborate staging about an aristocratic family and their household servants whose social order is inverted after they are shipwrecked on a desert island.
Max Beerbohm thought it "quite the best thing that has happened, in my time, to the British theatre".
Peter Pan (1912) by Sir
George Frampton in
Kensington Gardens, London The character of "Peter Pan" first appeared in
The Little White Bird. The novel was published in the UK by
Hodder & Stoughton in 1902 and serialised in the US in the same year in ''
Scribner's Magazine''. Barrie's more famous and enduring work ''
Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up'' had its first stage performance on 27 December 1904 at the
West End’s
Duke of York's Theatre. The tradition of having a woman play the title role started because at the time children were not allowed to act on stage, and smaller women were considered more believable in the role of a young boy. This play introduced audiences to the name "
Wendy"; it was inspired by a young girl named
Margaret Henley who called Barrie "Friendy", but could not pronounce her
Rs very well. The
Bloomsbury scenes show the societal constraints of late Victorian and Edwardian middle class domestic reality, contrasted with
Neverland, a world where morality is ambivalent.
George Bernard Shaw described the play as "ostensibly a holiday entertainment for children but really a play for grown-up people", suggesting deeper social metaphors at work in
Peter Pan. In 1907, it was parodied by H. G. Pélissier and
The Follies at the
Apollo Theatre on
Shaftesbury Avenue in a sketch entitled
Baffles or the Peterpan-tomime. This parody was in fact reviewed by Barrie himself in a magazine called
Sphere as being "funny in little bits", although he also concluded that
The Follies were "one of the funniest things now to be seen in London." Barrie had a long string of successes on the stage after
Peter Pan, many of which discuss social concerns, as Barrie continued to integrate his work and his beliefs.
The Twelve Pound Look (1910) concerns a wife leaving her 'typical' husband once she can gain an independent income. Other plays, such as
Mary Rose (1920) and
Dear Brutus (1917), revisit the idea of the ageless child and parallel worlds. Barrie was involved in the 1909 and 1911 attempts to challenge the censorship of the theatre by the
Lord Chamberlain, along with a number of other playwrights. In 1911, Barrie developed the
Peter Pan play into the novel
Peter and Wendy. In April 1929, Barrie gave the
copyright of the Peter Pan works to
Great Ormond Street Hospital, a leading children's hospital in London. The
current status of the copyright is somewhat complex. His final play was
The Boy David (1936), which dramatised 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, for whom Barrie wrote the play. == Social connections ==