This topic has been moved to JMBarrie.

http://www.jmbarrie.co.uk/msgbrd/index.php?topic=2484.0

Hello Elena, and welcome to this forum. Excellent choice for a thesis. Barrie definitely has more to offer than Peter Pan, so good to see his earliest plays remembered.

Barrie's Wikipedia page appears to give a complete list of his works, although some of his short stories may be missing. Otherwise, the online catalogues of the British Library (www.bl.uk) or the National Library of Scotland (www.nls.uk) would be useful.

I don't know offhand where one could find material on Ibsen's Ghosts itself, but the Beinecke Library at Yale University (http://beinecke.library.yale.edu) might help, as they have the largest collection of Barrie archives and material in the world.

Hope this helps, and good luck in your research.

HI PJ
Sounds great, and thanks for offering to share on this site. Individuals can't send in or attach scans themselves, it needs to be done by the administrator. I can't do it myself, so best thing is to send them direct to Andrew Birkin at laurenticwave@btinternet.com - who will no doubt be very interested! He can then add them to the database. Thanks.

Michael's death of course deeply affected Barrie, but when the letters were returned to him, he didn't have the letters burnt - he only asked for them to be disposed off. It was Peter LD who burnt them at a later date. This is what Andrew said in posts on this forum in 2009:

"I don't think anyone would have dared "edit" the Barrie/Michael letters while Barrie was alive. When he died in 1937, everything was packed up and put into storage, where it remained until 1946. It was then that Peter began writing his massive "Morgue". He planned to finish it with Michael's death in 1921, but in the event only managed to get as far as George's death in 1915, which evidently undid him. Read his letters to Mary Hodgson on the database to judge for yourself, but my guess (and Nico's too) was that he burned the lot in the early 1950s... "they were too much"."

"Sadly for us, Nico was 99% certain Peter had burned the lot. That was in 1976, and nothing has shown up since apart from one letter (in my book and the database) that was muddled up with Barrie's letters to Nico."

As far as I know, Barrie continued writing lots of letters after Michael's death, but perhaps fewer than before as Cynthia Asquith was taking over more and more of his correspondence, and he himself had health problems. Nico would have written to Barrie after his marriage as they had a close relationship, and Nico's wife got on well with Barrie. I suspect Nico's letters are now in the Beinecke Library at Yale University, along with most of the remaining Barrie archives sold to the library by the Asquith family.

Since Barrie started renting Stanway House for the summer in 1921, after Michael's death, I think it's indeed highly unlikely. There is always a possibility that he may have visited with JMB before that, but if so, it went unrecorded.

I should think it's quite likely, since JMB rented Stanway House for 12 summers from 1921 and he invited family and friends to stay. There is a mention in Nicola Beauman's biography of Cynthia Asquith that in the first year, some guests were getting on Barrie's nerves, including Jack's wife Gerry - according to one of Cynthia's letters, "Barrie's nerves regarding Gerry worse and worse, quite annoyed at finding her in my room". That's the only reference to Jack's visit though, and nothing about Peter. Bearing in mind both Jack and Peter were both adults and married by then, and therefore living quite separate lives, there were probably not regular visitors though.

It may well be that the film has not found a TV channel in the US as yet. The DVD is being released in the UK on 21 March, but I don't know whether it will be available in the US. If it find out more, I'll post an update.