Sentimental Tommy Books

A story that traces the boyhood of a "man about town" - beginning at age five, in England, his trials and tribulations, on to becoming a young man. The celebrated Tommy first comes into view on a dirty London stair and he was in sexless garments which were all he had and he was five and so though we are looking at him we must do it sideways lest he sit down hurriedly to hide them. That inscrutable face, which made the clubmen of his later days uneasy and even puzzled the ladies while he was making love to them, was already his. Press comments at the time of original publication: "Those who know a piece of life when they see it, and who care for the ultimate charm of a bit of pure literature, will read and re-read Mr. Barrie's masterpiece." - Hamilton W. Mabie "A work of fiction that is as original as it is fascinating. Here, indeed, is life itself and all the accompaniments thereof." - Joel Chandler Harris "It has wonderful merits ... In a degree almost unexampled in modern literature ... Its power is astounding." - The Speaker, London "Every phase of its hero's development is delightfully set forth; and the other personages - and they are countless - are all drawn with a master's hand." - New York Times

'... an extraordinary, and an unjustly forgotten, novel.' -- Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet. The second of J.M. Barrie's two novels about 'the celebrated Tommy', Tommy and Grizel is a richly ambivalent study of the destructive potential of the artistic imagination. Strikingly modern in its psychological and psychosexual concerns, the novel had a profound influence on the young D.H. Lawrence, whose sensibility was drawn to this searching examination of the complex emotions that beset the creator of fictions. Written at a critical moment in the construction of modern forms of sexual subjectivity, Tommy and Grizel is also a fascinating examination of the ambiguities and uncertainties of male desire. With a new critical introduction by Caroline McCracken-Flesher, which identifies sources, situates the work in Barrie's life and career, and examines the innovative form of the novel, readers can at last encounter this neglected work that ushered in a new era for the modern novel. Caroline McCracken-Flesher is Professor of English at the University of Wyoming. She was educated at Edinburgh Oxford, and Brown universities, and her books include Possible Scotlands: Walter Scott and the Story of Tomorrow (Oxford, 2005); The Doctor Dissected: A Cultural Autopsy of the Burke and Hare Murders (Oxford, 2012); and the edited volumes Culture, Nation, and the New Scottish Parliament (Bucknell, 2007); Scotland as Science Fiction (Bucknell, 2011); and Approaches to Teaching the Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (MLA, 2012).