J. M. Barrie Audiobooks

Peter Pan: the boy who would not grow up, and the play that never has

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Who is J. M. Barrie?

J. M. Barrie, born in Scotland in 1860, was a novelist and playwright who created one of the most durable figures in children’s literature: Peter Pan. Educated in Scotland, he moved to London and wrote a run of successful novels and plays there – and it was in London that he met the Llewelyn Davies boys, the children who inspired his story of a baby boy having magical adventures in Kensington Gardens, first aired in his 1902 adult novel The Little White Bird.

Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up followed in 1904: a West End fairy play about an ageless boy, an ordinary girl named Wendy and the fantasy world of Neverland. It overshadowed everything else he wrote and is credited with popularising the name Wendy. Barrie was made a baronet in 1913, appointed to the Order of Merit in 1922, and died in 1937 – but not before giving the rights to the Peter Pan works to Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children, which benefits from them to this day.

J. M. Barrie in audiobooks

Peter Pan is one of those stories most people inherit before they ever meet the original, and audio is a fine way to be reintroduced: it began life as a play, written to be spoken aloud, and that theatrical pulse survives in the telling. An ageless boy, an ordinary Wendy, Neverland waiting offstage – it remains superb family listening more than a century on.

There is also the afterglow of its history for UK listeners: this is the work whose rights Barrie gave to Great Ormond Street Hospital, a bequest that still does quiet good every time the story finds a new audience.