J.M. Barrie & the Lost Boys

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Yale University Press, 2003 - 323 pages
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J. M. Barrie, Victorian novelist, playwright, and author of Peter Pan or The Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up, led a life almost as magical and interesting as as his famous creation. Childless in his marriage, Barrie grew close to the five young boys of the Llewelyn Davies family, ultimately becoming their guardian and devoted surrogate father when they were orphaned. Andrew Birkin draws extensively on a vast range of material by and about Barrie, including notebooks, memoirs, and hours of recorded interviews with the family and their circle, to describe Barrie's life and the wonderful world he created for the boys.

Originally published in 1979, this enchanting and richly illustrated account is reissued with a new preface to mark the release of Neverland, the film of Barrie's life, and the upcoming centenary of Peter Pan.

"A psychological thriller . . . one of the year's most complex and absorbing biographies."--Gerald Clarke, Time

"A terrible and fascinating story."--Eve Auchincloss, Washington Post
 

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LibraryThing Review

Avis d'utilisateur  - Audacity - LibraryThing

This book became my undergraduate thesis topic, and I'm absolutely smitten. Birkin's masterful retelling of the relationship between Barrie and the LlD boys is fascinating. Plus, the book contains a ... Consulter l'avis complet

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Page 210 - No fuel and a long way from food, but it would do your heart good to be in our tent, to hear our songs and the cheery conversation as to what we will do when we get to Hut Point. Later. — We are very near the end, but have not and will not lose our good cheer.
Page 210 - We are in a desperate state — feet frozen, etc., no fuel, and a long way from food, but it would do your heart good to be in our tent, to hear our songs and...
Page 70 - The only ghosts, I believe, who creep into this world, are dead young mothers, returned to see how their children fare. There is no other inducement great enough to bring the departed back. They glide into the acquainted room when day and night, their jailers, are in the grip, and whisper, 'How is it with you, my child?
Page 7 - The horror of my boyhood was that I knew a time would come when I also must give up the games, and how it was to be done I saw not (this agony still returns to me in dreams, when I catch myself playing marbles, and look on with cold displeasure) ; I felt that I must continue playing in secret...
Page 7 - I know not whether it was owing to her loitering on the way one month to an extent flesh and blood could not bear, or because we had exhausted the penny library, but on a day I conceived a glorious idea, or it was put into my head by my mother, then desirous of making progress with her new clouty hearthrug. The notion was nothing short of this, why should I not write the tales myself ? I did write them — in the garret — but they by no means helped her to get on with her work, for when I finished...
Page 5 - I had learned his whistle (every boy of enterprise invents a whistle of his own) from boys who had been his comrades, I secretly put on a suit of his clothes, dark grey they were, with little spots, and they fitted me many years afterwards, and thus disguised I slipped, unknown to the others, into my mother's room. Quaking, I doubt not, yet so pleased, I stood still until she saw me, and then — how it must have hurt her !
Page 210 - I think it may uplift you all to stand for a moment by that tent and listen, as he says, to their songs and cheery conversation. When I think of Scott I remember the strange Alpine story of the youth who fell down a glacier and was lost, and of how a scientific companion, one of several who accompanied him, all young, computed that the body would again appear at a certain date and place many years afterwards. When that time came round some of the survivors returned to the glacier to see if the prediction...
Page 297 - I don't want ever to be a man," he said with passion. "I want always to be a little boy and to have fun.
Page 6 - The reason my books deal with the past instead of with the life I myself have known is simply this, that I soon grow tired of writing tales unless I can see a little girl, of whom my mother has told me, wandering confidently through the pages. Such a grip has her memory of her girlhood had upon me since I was a boy of six.

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À propos de l'auteur (2003)

Andrew Birkin has written many screenplays, including The Name of the Rose with Alain Godard and The Story of Joan of Arc with Luc Besson. He is currently writing the script for Patrick Suskind's Perfume.

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