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How bad was J.M. Barrie?

[Justine Picardie is a journalist working most recently at Vogue and as editor of the Observer Magazine. She is now a full-time freelance writer and lives with her husband and two sons in London.]

An obsessive stalker, an impotent husband, a lover of young boys... to some, the creator of 'Peter Pan' was an evil genius; to others, a misunderstood ingenue. Ever mindful of the J.M. Barrie 'curse', Justine Picardie investigates

'May God blast anyone who writes a biography of me,' declared J.M. Barrie, in a curse scrawled across the pages of one of his last notebooks. Since his death in 1937, this dire warning has not prevented a slew of writers taking him on, the latest of which is Piers Dudgeon, whose book Captivated is subtitled The Dark Side of Never Never Land, and examines what he believes to be Barrie's sinister influence over the du Maurier family.

Dudgeon's portrait of Barrie - as a man who filled the vacuum of his own sexual impotence by a compulsive desire to possess the family who inspired his most famous creation, Peter Pan - is entirely at odds with the Hollywood version, Finding Neverland, in which Johnny Depp portrayed the author as a charming hero, devoted to large dogs and small children. Here was the quirky little man who had already been celebrated by his contemporaries as a genius with a great heart, not least for his bequest of the copyright of Peter Pan to Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children, thus ensuring that the golden fairy-dust of his writing was liberally sprinkled over those in need.

But where does the truth lie about J.M. Barrie (an author who explored the shadowy borderlands where truth and lies mingle and breed)? At this point, I should confess to having become absorbed in Barrie's life while I was researching Daphne, a novel about Daphne du Maurier and her family; although I tried to keep Barrie on the very outer edges of my book (?let him come any closer, and he would have dominated the action, for his story is so extraordinary that it would push everyone else's aside). From the beginning, his life was marked by tragedy: born in Kirriemuir in 1860, the child of a Scottish weaver, he grew up in the shadow of an older brother, David, his mother's adored golden boy, who was killed on the eve of his 14th birthday in a skating accident....
Read entire article at Justine Picardie in the Telegraph (UK)