His excessive attachment to his mother led to lifelong problems in Barrie's relationships with women, including his wife, actress Mary Ansell, whom he married in 1894 and divorced in 1909. Barrie's other strong attachment was to his older brother David, whose accidental death at thirteen sent Margaret Ogilvy to bed for the remainder of her life and set Barrie to acting the role of the lost brother in order to win maternal attention and affection.
From 1873 to 1878 Barrie attended Dumfries Academy in Dumfries, Scotland, where his first play, Bandolero, the Bandit, was presented in 1877. Its hero was a composite of Barrie's fantasy heroes, gleaned from his reading of adventure stories. In 1878 he enrolled at Edinburgh University, taking his M.A. in 1882. Upon leaving the university, he became an editor for the Nottingham Journal and in 1885 became a journalist in London. In 1888 his first book, Better Dead, whose title echoed Barrie's own later appraisal of the work, was published. As a journalist Barrie had written several successful sketches of life in his birthplace, Kirriemuir, especially of the Auld Licht religious sect, to which his mother had belonged before her marriage.
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