Barry Pain Biography

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.

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.