Books with title A Window in Thrums

"A Window in Thrums'' is a very curious realistic production, but it cannot rightly be called a novel. It is rather a series of detached pictures taken from the domestic life of a Scotch weaver's family. There is no continuous narrative. The tableaux as they succeed one anotherillustrate the family relations and habits, and individualize the different persons introduced. Odd as are the author's methods, we come to know all his people quite intimately, and take a quick interest in the sayings and doings of these undemonstrative, outwardly hard and cold Scots, whose religious ardor seems strangely contrasted with their habitual stoicism of manner. "A Window in Thrums," however, shows that behind this surface of hardness there is an emotional capacity which may go the lengih of breaking hearts, and that behind the cold crust the warmest family affections may live with a force and persistence beyond natures far more quick to manifest their ephemeral feelings. The dialect in which the story is told is indeed so broad that many readers may find it an embarrassment. Words and expressions are used which seem strange even to those familiar with conventional Scotticisms. But this adds a quaint flavor to the book, and certainly does not interfere seriously with its effectiveness, which is remarkably great.

On the bump of green round which the brae twists, at the top of the brae, and within cry of T'nowhead Farm, still stands a one-storey house, whose whitewashed walls, streaked with the discoloration that rain leaves, look yellow when the snow comes. In the old days the stiff ascent left Thrums behind, and where is now the making of a suburb was only a poor row of dwellings and a manse, with Hendry's cot to watch the brae. The house stood bare, without a shrub, in a garden whose paling did not go all the way round, the potato pit being only kept out of the road, that here sets off southward, by a broken dyke of stones and earth. On each side of the slate-coloured door was a window of knotted glass. Ropes were flung over the thatch to keep the roof on in wind. Into this humble abode I would take any one who cares to accompany me. But you must not come in a contemptuous mood, thinking that the poor are but a stage removed from beasts of burden, as some cruel writers of these days say; nor will I have you turn over with your foot the shabby horse-hair chairs that Leeby kept so speckless, and Hendry weaved for years to buy, and Jess so loved to look upon.

Window in Thrums, A, by Sir James M. Barrie (1889), is a continuation of the ‘Auld Licht’ series. Its scenes are confined mainly to the interior of the little Scotch cot in “Thrums” where lived Hendry and Jess McQumpha, and their daughter Leeby. In Mr. Barrie’s later work, ‘Margaret Ogilvy,’ an affectionate and artistic picture of his mother, we discern that in Jess and Leeby his mother and sister sat for the portraits. Jess is a quaint figure. A chronic invalid, yet throbbing with interest in everybody and everything, she sits at the window of her cottage, and keeps up with Leeby a running fire of terse and often cutting comment upon village happenings, and thus holds herself in touch with the life and gossip which she knows only through the window. Barrie’s sympathetic ability to see how inseparable are humor and pathos makes his characters living and human.

The prolific Scotish author and dramatist J. M. Barrie is most famous for his creation of Peter Pan. Born in Kirriemuir, Forfarshire in 1860, he graduated Edinburgh University and began working as a journalist. Soon after he published his first novel Better Dead becaming a popular writer with many successful novels. After his most famous work Peter Pan he still continued to write on creating many more beloved tales.

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A Window in Thrums - the story of the "untrue son" - is one of several novels about the fictional village of Thrums, said to be modeled on Barrie's home town of Kirriemuir. About the Author Barrie was a Scottish playwright and novelist. He is best remembered for his play Peter Pan, a supernatural fantasy about a boy who refused to grow up. The son of a weaver, Barrie studied at the University of Edinburgh. He took up journalism, worked for a Nottingham newspaper, and contributed to various London journals before moving to London in 1885. His early works, Auld Licht Idylls (1889) and A Window in Thrums (1889), contain fictional sketches of Scottish life. The publication of The Little Minister (1891) established his reputation as a novelist. During the next 10 years Barrie continued writing novels, but gradually his interest turned toward the theater From 1930 until his death he was chancellor of the University of Edinburgh.