If Sir James M. Barrie had written no play other than Peter Pan (1904), the extraordinary and enduring popularity of this single work would testify to his talents as a dramatist. As it stands, however, the more than forty plays he wrote also manifest his creativity, albeit a creativity often marred by excessive sentimentality. Barrie's fifty-year career as a playwright exposed him to the whimsy of W. S. Gilbert, the problem plays of Ibsen and Shaw, and the social comedy of Oscar Wilde. Indeed, his plays taken as a whole form a compendium of later nineteenth- and early twentieth-century dramatic and theatrical conventions--a virtue which paradoxically also makes his works seem dated.

James Matthew Barrie was the third son and youngest child of David and Margaret Ogilvy Barrie. Barrie's somewhat austere father seems not to have been nearly so important to Barrie as his mother, whom he idolized and...