A literary scoop: the passionate correspondence between R.L. Stevenson and J.M. Barrie

This book has appeared with no fuss or fanfare and yet by any account it is something of a scoop. For here, published for the first time, is the correspondence between J.M. Barrie and Robert Louis Stevenson, revealing one of the most intriguing literary bromances of the 19th century.

The existence of the letters is well documented. In the early 1890s, gossip columns were agog with the news that two of the most popular writers of the day were corresponding, with Barrie reported to be writing ‘reams of letters’ to Stevenson. But while Stevenson’s letters to Barrie were published after the former’s death, Barrie’s letters to Stevenson never surfaced. It is thanks to their recent discovery by Michael Shaw, an academic at the University of Stirling, that we can now read the correspondence in full.

‘I wish I was this letter now, and that I might see you in the flesh’, Barrie writes to Stevenson

The first letter is dated February 1892, when Stevenson was at the height of his fame, while Barrie, ten years his junior, was already known for popular books such as The Little Minister, but yet to write Peter Pan. As Shaw notes in his informative introduction, one of the key themes in the letters is the authors’ ‘respect for each other’s “genius”’. But what is fascinating is the shift in authority. In the earlier letters, Stevenson takes the role of literary mentor to his ‘brither Scot’, doling out advice about plots and characterisation: ‘You should never write about anybody until you persuade yourself at least for the moment that you love him,’ is one nugget of wisdom. But as Stevenson reads more of Barrie’s work, his tone changes. He writes to him in December 1892, after reading Barrie’s novel A Window in Thrums: ‘I am a capable artist; but it begins to look to me as if you were a man of genius.’