Auld Licht Idylls

Long before J. M. Barrie gained lasting fame for Peter Pan, the author contented himself by writing about his native homeland of Scotland. Although critics have discounted Barrie's early work as "sentimental and nostalgic depictions of a parochial Scotland, far from the realities of the industrialised nineteenth century," his stories of rural, country life provide a necessary critique of modernity, following a similar, regionalistic trajectory of Robert Frost and Edgar Lee Masters.