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nothing about him that was not true, but doing it with unnecessary scorn in the hope that I might goad you into crying, “Come, come, you are too hard on him.”
    Such passages are significant because they reveal how early in his writings Barrie tried to objectivize himself as the boy who wouldn’t grow up. He consciously—and, one might add, successfully—developed a manipulative narrative style through the use of a fictional author who plays on the sympathies of his readers with charm and wit. All the time Barrie was doctoring his life story, almost as if he were writing the “fairy tale of my life,” as Hans Christian Andersen had done in his autobiography. Like Andersen, Barrie did not reveal truths about himself; rather, he doctored his writings to conceal terrifying insights into his own psyche and behavior. Many writers compose autobiographical works to construct legends about themselves and prevent the public from forming their own opinions about them. Barrie was no different—he always tried to censor and govern his relations with the outer world.
    And relate he did—on a grand scale. The more famous he became in the 1890s, the more he began taking an interest in grand society and in young women. Barrie’s financial situation improved immensely, allowing him to move to grander living quarters and to dine and mix with people of the upper classes. With more fame and confidence he began dating young actresses, whom he had always admired but felt too shy to meet. By the time his play
Walker, London
(1892) was produced in London, he had fallen in love with Mary Ansell, a talented, beautiful actress. During a long courtship with her, he knew that she wanted to marry him, but he hesitated for months to ask her. In one of the more telling accounts of his life,
J. M. Barrie: The Man Behind the Image
, Janet Dunbar comments:
    Heaven knows what dark night of the soul James Matthew Barrie went through at the idea of a union with a flesh and blood woman. He would never again be able to escape into romantic images when life brought his high-powered imagination into conflict with the realities of marriage. How much did Barrie know about himself? Did he know, or did he suspect, that he lacked virility and should not marry at all? It is difficult to believe that he never thought about sex, with that imagination; but, equally, it is not difficult to understand why he still flinched awayfrom any full-blooded approach to women. Margaret Ogilvy had put her thumbmark on him in his most impressionable years, and subconsciously he still accepted her appalling puritanical attitude that a man’s relations with his wife were “regrettable but necessary.” It is probable that the only way he could resolve the complexes which this attitude set up was by sublimating his natural desires—turning them into a kind of romantic worship which he knew in his inner heart was false, but which he was not able to help. His pathological shyness must also have been a factor (
J. M. Barrie: The Man Behind the Image
, 10).
    Yet he overcame his shyness and doubts and married Mary Ansell on July 4, 1894. They took their honeymoon in Switzerland, where, according to his wife, their marriage was never sexually consummated. Ironically, the unproductive years of their marriage, which ended in divorce in 1909, coincided with one of Barrie’s most productive periods. Not only did he write the novel
The Little White Bird
(1902), with key chapters introducing Peter Pan to the world (published separately in 1906 in
Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens
), he also produced some of his great plays, such as
The Little Minister
(1897),
Quality Street
(1902),
The Admirable Crichton
(1902),
Little Mary
(1903),
Peter Pan
(1904),
What Every Woman Knows
(1908), and
A Slice of Life
(1910). Moreover, he corresponded with most of the great writers of his time, including Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert Louis Stevenson, Thomas Hardy, H. G. Wells, and others, and he was personally