The Plays of J.M. Barrie [together with] The Works of...

London Hodder & Stoughton, last three volumes (undated) Cassell & Company, Ltd., 1928 -1932. . 21 vols, Sml. 8vo (180 x 130 mm (7 1/4 x 5 in); small, marginal corner stain affecting poart of one vol. (When a Man's Single), otherwise clean and bright; publisher's full blue calf, spines gilt, author's gilt monogram to front covers, top edge gilt, near-fine.
From the author's inscription to the verso of the second upper free endpaper of; The Little Minster, this set would appear to be a gift to a nurse caring for him at the time: 'Some Scotch books to my kind nurse Sister Seaton, at 15 Park Lane, from her grateful patient, J. M. Barrie, Feb 1933'.

Sir James Matthew Barrie, 1st Baronet, (1860 - 1937), Scottish dramatist and novelist who is best known as the creator of Peter Pan, the boy who refused to grow up.

Barrie's first successful book, Auld Licht Idylls (1888), contained sketches of life in Kirriemuir (his birthplace) and the stories in A Window in Thurms (1889) continued to explore that setting. The Little Minister (1891), a highly sentimental novel in the same style, was a best seller and, after its dramatisation in 1897, Barrie wrote mostly for the theatre. His autobiographical novels When a Man's Single (1888) and Sentimental Tommy (1896) both feature a little boy in Kirriemuir ('Thrums') who weaves a cloak of romantic fiction between himself and reality and becomes a successful writer. Most of those early works are marked by quaint Scottish dialect, whimsical humour, comic clowning, pathos and sentimentality.

Most of Barrie's stage triumphs have been dismissed by critics as marred by ephemeral whimsicalities but at least six of his plays—Quality Street (1901), The Admirable Crichton (1902), What Every Woman Knows (1908), The Twelve-Pound Look (1910), The Will (1913) and Dear Brutus (1917), are of indisputably high quality.