But throughout the last century key Barrie biographers have speculated about their whereabouts and existence. The letters had been acquired by the collector Edwin J.Beinecke in the 1950s and were catalogued and listed in the library archive. While many of Stevenson’s letters to Barrie appeared in print soon after Stevenson’s death in 1894 and the rest were published over the course of the 20th century, Barrie’s side of the correspondence has, until now, remained unpublished.ĭr Michael Shaw, a lecturer in Scottish literature at the University of Stirling, came across the letters while researching a box of correspondence at Beinecke Library in Yale University. Later, he recounts Stevenson’s whimsical directions to the island of Samoa (“you take the boat at San Francisco, and then my place is second to the left”), which seem to echo Peter Pan’s famous directions for the island of Neverland: “Second to the right and straight on till morning.” In reality, Barrie was held back from ever making that thrilling journey to Stevenson’s Pacific island paradise by his desire to stay near his frail, elderly mother – feelings he later explores intensely in Peter Pan – and had to content himself with merely writing 3,000-word letters to his beloved friend. Robert Louis Stevenson moved to Samoa in the South Pacific for his health.
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