James Matthew Barrie

Auld Licht Idylls and a Window in Thrums - The Kailyard authors James Matthew Barrie

Publisher Marketing: 'Thrums is the name I give here to the handful of houses jumbled together in a cup' rrie's sketches of Scottish life in a small town in the early nineteenth-century occupy a curious and fascinating place in the history of Scottish literature. Set in his native Kirriemuir, and based on the childhood memories of his mother, Auld Licht Idylls (1888) and A Window in Thrums (1889) have long been misleadingly understood as marking the foundations of the debilitating 'Kailyard' tradition in Scottish fiction. Yet as new and returning readers can now recognise, the subtle mixture of irony, humour and sentiment in Barrie's presentation of the fringes and remnants (the 'thrums') of past ways of life produces a much richer and more complex evocation of the themes of memory and nostalgia than has hitherto been perceived. With an extended introduction, which traces Barrie's process of composition and discusses the literary context of the works, as well as the historical and religious background to the portrayal of the Auld Lichts, readers can appreciate to the full why these two early books by the author of Peter Pan prompted Robert Louis Stevenson to declare Barrie a 'genius', with 'the glamour of twilight' on his pen.

Contributor Bio:  Barrie, James Matthew J. M. Barrie was born in 1860, the ninth of ten children of hard-working parents in Scotland's jute-weaving industry. Fascinated by stories of her own life told him by his mother, he was determined to write, finding work on the Nottingham Journal after graduating from Edinburgh University. In 1885, he moved to London as a freelance writer and successfully sold the Auld Licht Idylls, a volume based on his mother's tales. By the time Peter Pan opened on the London stage in 1904, Barrie had written more than thirty novels and plays, many autobiographical and several of them major hits such as The Little Minister, Quality Street and The Admirable Crichton. Knighted and awarded the Order of Merit he continued writing into old age. He died in 1937.