Barry Pain

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Barry Eric Odell Pain (September 28, 1864 – May 5, 1928) was an English journalist, poet and writer.

Born in Cambridge, and educated at the university, he became a prominent contributor to The Granta. He was known as a writer of parody and lightly humorous stories.

In 1889, Cornhill Magazine's editor, James Payn, published his story "The Hundred Gates", and shortly afterwards Pain became a contributor to Punch and The Speaker, and joined the staffs of the Daily Chronicle and Black and White.

Pain's works include In a Canadian Canoe (1891), papers reprinted from The Granta; Playthings and Parodies (1892); The Kindness of the Celestial (1894); The Octave of Claudius (1897); Eliza (1900); Another English Woman's Love Letters (1901); The Shadow of the Unseen (1907); An Exchange of Souls (1911); and others.

Eliza was serialised by BBC Radio 4 in 2006. Prior to this, in 1992, twelve of the stories were adapted for BBC2 as ten minute shorts, featuring Sue Roderick as Eliza and John Sessions as her husband.

"An exchange of souls" is credited with being inspirational to H.P.Lovecraft ,specificaly in his short story "The Thing on the Doorstep" .

In 2006 Hippocampus Press re-published "an exchange of souls" together with Henri Béraud's Lazarus .

[edit] Sources

• Author and Book Info.com
• Dictionary of Literary Biography
• Review of Pain's novels The Octave of Claudius and An Exchange of Souls, written by F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre
• This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.

[edit] External links

• N. T. P. Murphy, ‘Pain, Barry Eric Odell (1864–1928)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, accessed 2 Jan 2008