The Life and Times of Robert Louis Stevenson

Robert Louis Stevenson’s Life

Stevenson finished the story in Davos, to which he had returned in the autumn, and then started on Prince Otto , a more complex but less successful work. Treasure Island is an adventure presented with consummate skill, with atmosphere, character, and action superbly geared to one another.

The book is at once a gripping adventure tale and a wry comment on the ambiguity of human motives. In Stevenson published Virginibus Puerisque , his first collection of essays, most of which had appeared in The Cornhill. The winter of he spent at a chalet in Davos. A Tale of the Two Roses , a historical adventure tale deliberately written in anachronistic language.

They lived at Bournemouth from September until July , but his frequent bouts of dangerous illness proved conclusively that the British climate, even in the south of England, was not for him. The Bournemouth years were fruitful, however. There he got to know and love the American novelist Henry James. In Kidnapped the fruit of his researches into 18th-century Scottish history and of his feeling for Scottish landscape, history, character, and local atmosphere mutually illuminate one another. But it was Dr. Jekyll —both moral allegory and thriller—that established his reputation with the ordinary reader.

In August , still in search of health, Stevenson set out for America with his wife, mother, and stepson. On arriving in New York, he found himself famous, with editors and publishers offering lucrative contracts. This novel , another exploration of moral ambiguities , contains some of his most impressive writing, although it is marred by its contrived conclusion. In June Stevenson, accompanied by his family, sailed from San Francisco in the schooner yacht Casco, which he had chartered, on what was intended to be an excursion for health and pleasure.

In fact, he was to spend the rest of his life in the South Seas. They went first to the Marquesas Islands , then to Fakarava Atoll, then to Tahiti , then to Honolulu , where they stayed nearly six months, leaving in June for the Gilbert Islands , and then to Samoa , where he spent six weeks. During his months of wandering around the South Sea islands, Stevenson made intensive efforts to understand the local scene and the inhabitants.

Robert Louis Stevenson

He was writing first-rate journalism, deepened by the awareness of landscape and atmosphere, such as that so notably rendered in his description of the first landfall at Nuku Hiva in the Marquesas. In October he returned to Samoa from a voyage to Sydney and established himself and his family in patriarchal status at Vailima, his house in Samoa. The climate suited him; he led an industrious and active life; and, when he died suddenly, it was of a cerebral hemorrhage , not of the long-feared tuberculosis. His work during those years was moving toward a new maturity.

The next phase was demonstrated triumphantly in Weir of Hermiston , the unfinished masterpiece on which he was working on the day of his death. Stevenson achieved in this work a remarkable richness of tragic texture in a style stripped of all superfluities. The dialogue contains some of the best Scots prose in modern literature. Stevenson was an indefatigable letter writer, and his letters edited by Sidney Colvin in provide a lively and enchanting picture of the man and his life.

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Hyde , novella by Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson , published in The names of Dr. Stevenson on the other hand was not much interested in studying science; instead he spent ample time studying French Literature, Scottish history, and the works of Darwin and Spencer.

His love for literature forced him to tell his father about his growing interests in literature and that he wanted to pursue a career and studies in the field of writing. The news severely upset his father who finally advised Robert to prepare for the Bar exam so that he would have a respectable profession to fall back on if his literary ambitions failed.

He experienced two faces of the city. One was the religious, respectable and conventional town while the other face of Edinburgh was that of more bohemian town with brothels, shady characters and underhanded dealings.

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Through these observations Stevenson learned a great deal about the duality of human nature which later became the base for his novel, The Strange Case of Dr. In , Stevenson suffered from a severe chest condition and nervous exhaustion due to which he was advised by his doctor to go abroad and rest for an extended period of time.

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Stevenson spent 6 months in South France during which he worked on numerous essays. He continued with the flow of writing after his return to Edinburgh writing articles, book reviews and short stories. During this time, Stevenson met Fanny Vandergrift Osbourne, an American woman who was 10 years older than him.

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