{'Mary Rose'}[27th December 1987]

[Redbook4:266-267][19871227:2125]{'Mary Rose'}[27th December 1987]

19871227.2125

Fiction writing is full of coincidences, not only between fiction and later actuality, but between fictions: and some of the last must be due to knowledge normally obtained* but unconsciously recalled.

I am aware that [...]land is likely to have owed something to the Celtic Green Isle of the Great Deep, and I have speculated that J.M. Barrie's Never Never Land arose from the same cultural memory. But I am not aware of having even heard, until this year, of his play 'Mary Rose', of which I have just watched all except the first twenty minutes or so, with its Peter Pan resonances; its strange Hebridean island on which people disappear, sometimes to reappear days or even years later, unchanged – only to become (by some uncertain process) ghosts for a while**; and the curious co-incidence that the name of the family to whose daughter all this happens is Morland.

But I am quite capable of having come across these facts and 'forgotten' (or lost) them: though it is unlikely that I [have] actually read the play. I feel that a play of such interest to me – even before [...]land – is likely to have stayed available to my conscious recollection. But I could be wrong.

*[i.e. obtained in a normal way]

**before departing for a Heaven not all that unlike the island

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