Want fewer ads?

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

Born in Cambridge, he was educated at Sedbergh School and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. 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. Stories in the Dark (1901) and Stories In Grey (1911) contain several of Pain's horror stories, including the famous "The Moon-Slave". Going Home (1921) is a sentimental fantasy story about a winged man.

Alfred Noyes was a friend of Pain's and for several summers they were near neighbours at Rottingdean. In Noyes' autobiography, one of the longest chapters is devoted to Pain.

Noyes particularly admired Pain's novel The Exiles of Faloo (1910), of which he writes: "It is the story of an island in the Pacific, to which a number of scoundrels of various kinds, together with other men not entirely scoundrels but broken by the law, had escaped 'beyond the law's pursuing.' They establish a Club, with rules designed for the circumstances, one of which naturally was that no credit should be given. Gradually, through the original flaws in character, the society ends disastrously in conflict with the native population. There is humour and heroism, beauty and tragedy in the tale and, like all great stories, it is a parable."

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, specifically 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.

This author page uses material from the Wikipedia article "Barry Pain", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0