Members of the Stevenson household in Vailima, Western Samoa, Joe Strong, Margaret Stevenson, Lloyd Osborne, Robert Louis Stevenson, Fanny Stevenson and the steward Simi. Stevenson's step-daughter Belle is sitting on the right in the middle row.
(An Inland Voyage is a travelogue by Robert Louis Stevenso...)
An Inland Voyage is a travelogue by Robert Louis Stevenson about a canoeing trip through France and Belgium in 1876. It is Stevenson's earliest book and a pioneering work of outdoor literature.
(Written by a superb prose stylist, a master of both actio...)
Written by a superb prose stylist, a master of both action and atmosphere, the story centers upon the conflict between good and evil - but in this case a particularly engaging form of evil. It is the villainy of that most ambiguous rogue Long John Silver that sets the tempo of this tale of treachery, greed, and daring.
(The Silverado Squatters is Robert Louis Stevenson's trave...)
The Silverado Squatters is Robert Louis Stevenson's travel memoir of his two-month honeymoon trip with Fanny Vandegrift and her son Lloyd Osbourne to Napa Valley, California, in 1880.
(Robert Louis Stevenson’s rhymes have charmed children and...)
Robert Louis Stevenson’s rhymes have charmed children and adults alike since 1885, when they first appeared to a delighted public. Stevenson’s joyful exploration of the world speaks directly from a child’s point of view and celebrates the child’s imagination. This Golden Books edition, originally published in 1951, features lively, colorful illustrations by Caldecott Medalists Alice and Martin Provensen.
(Prince Otto: A Romance is a novel written by Robert Louis...)
Prince Otto: A Romance is a novel written by Robert Louis Stevenson, first published in 1885. The novel was largely written during 1883. Stevenson referred to Prince Otto as "my hardest effort", one of the chapters was rewritten eight times by Stevenson and once by his wife.
(Swindled out of his inheritance, recently orphaned David ...)
Swindled out of his inheritance, recently orphaned David Balfour finds himself kidnapped and aboard a slave ship bound for the Carolinas shortly after the Jacobite rising of 1745. A shipwreck leads to a chance encounter and an unlikely rescuer - Highland rebel and suspected assassin Alan Breck Stewart. An incredible friendship blossoms between the two young men, who occupy opposite ends of the political and religious spectra. Together they return to the mainland, outwit many murderous foes and schemers, and attempt to restore David to his rightful fortune.
(In seeking to discover his inner self, the brilliant Dr J...)
In seeking to discover his inner self, the brilliant Dr Jekyll discovers a monster. First published to critical acclaim in 1886, this mesmerising thriller is a terrifying study of the duality of man's nature, and it is the book which established Stevenson's reputation as a writer.
(Underwoods is a collection of poems by Robert Louis Steve...)
Underwoods is a collection of poems by Robert Louis Stevenson published in 1887. It comprises two books, Book I with 38 poems in English, Book II with 16 poems in Scots.
(The Black Arrow tells the story of Richard (Dick) Shelton...)
The Black Arrow tells the story of Richard (Dick) Shelton during the Wars of the Roses: how he becomes a knight, rescues his lady Joanna Sedley, and obtains justice for the murder of his father, Sir Harry Shelton.
(Set in Scotland during the 1745 Jacobite Rebellion, in th...)
Set in Scotland during the 1745 Jacobite Rebellion, in the exotic French Indies, and in the North American wilderness, the story has as its hero one of the most compelling yet horrifying studies of evil in nineteenth-century fiction - James Durie, Master of Ballantrae. The Master is about his infective influence - on his younger, less attractive brother Henry; on Henry's wife Alison; and on those narrators whom Stevenson so skilfully employs to present their experiences of this charming, ruthless, and evil man.
(TA black comic novel about the last remaining survivors o...)
TA black comic novel about the last remaining survivors of a tontine - a group life-insurance policy in which the last surviving member stands to receive a fortune.
(The collection of poems presents beautiful ballads, a cou...)
The collection of poems presents beautiful ballads, a couple of which are based on actual folk tales of Scotland, while others were conjectured by the poet himself. The stories are harmoniously narrated and compiled. The last one touches the tender love of children towards their parents.
(Across the Plains is the middle section of Robert Louis S...)
Across the Plains is the middle section of Robert Louis Stevenson's three-part travel memoir which began with The Amateur Emigrant and ended with The Silverado Squatters.
(Songs of Travel and Other Verses is an 1896 book of poetr...)
Songs of Travel and Other Verses is an 1896 book of poetry by Robert Louis Stevenson. It explores the author's perennial themes of travel and adventure. The work gained a new public and popularity when it was set to music in Songs of Travel by Ralph Vaughan Williams.
Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes and Other Travel Writings
(This collection presents some of Stevenson's finest writi...)
This collection presents some of Stevenson's finest writing in that vein, starting with "An Inland Voyage." This 1878 chronicle of a canoe journey through Belgium and France charmingly captures the European villages and townspeople of a bygone era. Other selections include "Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes," a humorous account of a mountain trek, and "Forest Notes," a meditation on nature based on visits to the Forest of Fontainebleau near Paris and adjacent artists' colonies.
Robert Louis Stevenson was a Scottish novelist. He is renowned for his adventure novels Treasure Island and Kidnapped: Being Memoirs of the Adventures of David Balfour in the Year 1751, and for his outstanding work of supernatural horror The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Stevenson is additionally remembered as a travel writer and author of children's verse.
Background
Robert Louis Stevenson was born to Thomas and Margaret Stevenson on November 13, 1850, in Edinburgh, Scotland. An only child, Stevenson was a frail boy who was given to the indomitable care of a young nurse named Alison Cunningham, or "Cummie," as Stevenson called her. His father was the son of Robert Stevenson, the progenitor of a family of legendary lighthouse engineers responsible for the design and construction of Skerryvore, Bell Rock, and other famous beacons along the north coast of Scotland. Thomas was himself a lighthouse engineer, a professional legacy that Robert was expected to continue. Margaret was the youngest child of thirteen of the Reverend Louis Balfour, the Presbyterian minister of Colinton, Scotland, near Edinburgh.
Education
Stevenson was sent to a nearby school at age 6. Because of his frequent illnesses, he was taught for long by private tutors. In 1861 Robert went on to the Edinburgh Academy. He began to read at age 7 or 8, but even before this, he dictated stories to his mother and nurse. He also wrote stories throughout his childhood. For a year Stevenson studied at Boarding school in Isleworth, later moved to Robert Thomson's School.
In November 1867 Stevenson entered Edinburgh University, where he pursued his studies indifferently until 1872. Instead of concentrating on academic work, he busied himself in learning how to write, imitating the styles of William Hazlitt, Sir Thomas Browne, Daniel Defoe, Charles Lamp, and Michel de Montaigne. By the time he was twenty-one, he had contributed several papers to the short-lived Edinburgh University Magazine, the best of which was a fanciful bit of fluff entitled "The Philosophy of Umbrellas." Edinburgh University was a place for him to play the truant more than the student. His only consistent course of study seemed to have been of bohemia: Stevenson adopted a wide-brimmed hat, a cravat, and a boy's coat that earned him the nickname of Velvet Jacket, while he indulged a taste for haunting the byways of Old Town and becoming acquainted with its denizens.
In 1873 Stevenson suffered severe respiratory illness and was sent to the French Riviera. He returned home the following spring. In July 1875 he was called to the Scottish bar, but he never practiced.
Stevenson was frequently abroad, most often in France. Two of his journeys produced An Inland Voyage (1878) and Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes (1879). His career as a writer developed slowly. His essay "Roads" appeared in the Portfolio in 1873, and in 1874 "Ordered South" appeared in Macmillan’s Magazine, a review of Lord Lytton’s Fables in Song appeared in the Fortnightly, and his first contribution (on Victor Hugo) appeared in The Cornhill Magazine, then edited by Leslie Stephen, a critic and biographer. It was these early essays, carefully wrought, quizzically meditative in tone, and unusual in sensibility, that first drew attention to Stevenson as a writer.
After his return from Scotland, where he had been to achieve reconciliation with his father, Stevenson, accompanied by his wife and his stepson, Lloyd Osbourne, went, on medical advice, to Davos, Switzerland. The family left there in April 1881 and spent the summer in Pitlochry and then in Braemar, Scotland. There, in spite of bouts of illness, Stevenson embarked on Treasure Island (begun as a game with Lloyd), which started as a serial in Young Folks, under the title The Sea-Cook, in October 1881. Stevenson finished the story in Davos, to which he had returned in the autumn, and then started on Prince Otto (1885), 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 1881 Stevenson published Virginibus Puerisque, his first collection of essays, most of which had appeared in The Cornhill. The winter of 1881 he spent at a chalet in Davos. In April 1882 he left Davos; but a stay in the Scottish Highlands, while it resulted in two of his finest short stories, "Thrawn Janet" and "The Merry Men," produced lung hemorrhages, and in September he went to the south of France. There the Stevensons finally settled at a house in Hyères, where, in spite of intermittent illness, Stevenson was happy and worked well. He revised Prince Otto, worked on A Child’s Garden of Verses (first called Penny Whistles), and began The Black Arrow: A Tale of the Two Roses (1888), a historical adventure tale deliberately written in anachronistic language.
The threat of a cholera epidemic drove the Stevensons from Hyères back to Britain. They lived at Bournemouth from September 1884 until July 1887, 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. There he revised A Child’s Garden (first published in 1885) and wrote "Markheim," Kidnapped, and Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The poems in A Child’s Garden represent with extraordinary fidelity an adult’s recapturing of the emotions and sensations of childhood; there is nothing else quite like them in English literature. 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 1887, 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. He stayed for a while in the Adirondack Mountains, where he wrote essays for Scribner’s and began The Master of Ballantrae. This novel, another exploration of moral ambiguities, contains some of his most impressive writing, although it is marred by its contrived conclusion.
In June 1888 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 1889 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. As a result, his writings on the South Seas (In the South Seas, 1896; A Footnote to History, 1892) are admirably pungent and perceptive. 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 of 1890, the Stevenson party returned to Samoa to settle, after a third cruise that had taken them to Australia, the Gilberts, the Marshalls, and some of the more remote islands in the South Seas. The Samoan islands had been claimed by Great Britain, Germany, and the United States, by this time, and Stevenson developed a lively disdain for their colonial presences - in many cases taking much more the part of the Samoans, whom he saw as unjustly governed in slapdash fashion by slovenly rulers.
While he lived in the Pacific, Stevenson kept up his usual impressive literary output, but in the last two years of his life his letters to his friends in Great Britain increasingly revealed a longing for Scotland and the frustration he felt at the thought of never seeing his homeland again. It may have been this preoccupation with Scotland and its history that made Weir of Hermiston so powerful a tale. With its theme of filial rebellion, and its evocation of Scotland's topography, language, and legends, it is a masterly fragment and the most Scottish of all his works. Records of a Family of Engineers, a biographical work that recounts his grandfather's engineering feats, reveals, too, that Stevenson was trying to find a bridge back to his own family and finally coming to terms with his earlier rejection of the engineering profession. In Records of a Family of Engineers he depicts his grandfather as a scientist-artist, linking his own growing objectivity in his style of writing to the technical yet imaginative work of his forebears. Increasingly Stevenson's art embraced more of the everyday world and drew on his experiences in the South Seas for its strength. When he died of a stroke on December 3, 1894, in his house at Vailima, Samoa, he was at the height of his creative powers.
In his short life, Robert Louis Stevenson achieved an international reputation for his essays, travel books, poetry, and novels, including one of the best-known of all children's books, Treasure Island. Throughout his whole career, he was also a notable writer of short fiction. He is very much part of the Scottish tradition.
The Writers' Museum off Edinburgh's Royal Mile devoted a room to Stevenson, containing some of his personal possessions from childhood to adulthood. A bronze memorial to Robert, designed by the American sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens in 1904, is mounted in the Moray Aisle of St Giles' Cathedral. A plaque above the door of a house in Castleton of Braemar states "Here R.L. Stevenson spent the Summer of 1881 and wrote Treasure Island, his first great work."
In 1994, to mark the 100th anniversary of Stevenson's death, the Royal Bank of Scotland issued a series of commemorative £1 notes which featured a quill pen and Stevenson's signature.
Three U.S. elementary schools are named after Robert Stevenson.
Stevenson's parents were Presbyterians. His nurse Alison Cunningham was more fervently religious. The mix of Calvinism and folk beliefs were an early source of nightmares for the child. Because of that, Robert showed a precocious concern for religion. Later, during his years at the university, Robert rebelled against his parents’ religion and set himself up as an atheist.
Politics
For most of his life, Stevenson believed in Conservatism. In 1866, he voted for Benjamin Disraeli, future Conservative Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.
Robert wrote at age 26: "I look back to the time when I was a Socialist with something like regret…. Now I know that in thus turning Conservative with years, I am going through the normal cycle of change and travelling in the common orbit of men's opinions."
Views
The imagination of Stevenson, like that of Scott and many other Scottish writers to this day, was nourished on the Border ballads. These are narrative poems, which have been passed on in oral tradition, telling of love, battle, and the supernatural. They are direct, economical in words, and strongly evocative of mood and place. As a child Stevenson had a nurse, Alison Cunningham, of Presbyterian and Covenanting convictions, who told him stories in good Scots, often involving moral dilemmas and encounters with the devil. All of these influences were to appear later in Stevenson's fiction.
Some of Stevenson's plots are ingenious and full of surprise, but he is a master of the story that depends for its effect more on its atmosphere and the tension of not knowing what might happen next than on the events or even character.
Quotations:
"Don't judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant."
"Life is not a matter of holding good cards, but of playing a poor hand well."
"There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy. By being happy we sow anonymous benefits upon the world."
"We are all travelers in the wilderness of this world, and the best we can find in our travels is an honest friend."
"Keep your fears to yourself, but share your courage with others."
"You think those dogs will not be in heaven! I tell you they will be there long before any of us."
"A friend is a gift you give yourself."
"The saints are the sinners who keep on trying."
"In each of us, two natures are at war – the good and the evil. All our lives the fight goes on between them, and one of them must conquer. But in our own hands lies the power to choose – what we want most to be we are."
"You can give without loving, but you can never love without giving."
"The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean; not to affect your reader, but to affect him precisely as you wish."
"Everyone, at some time or another, sits down to a banquet of consequences."
"You cannot run away from a weakness, you must sometimes fight it out or perish. And if that be so, why not now and where you stand?"
"Our business in life is not to succeed, but to continue to fail in good spirits."
"I regard you with an indifference closely bordering on aversion."
"Make the most of the best and the least of the worst."
"The world is so full of a number of things, I ’m sure we should all be as happy as kings."
"Everyday courage has few witnesses. But yours is no less noble because no drum beats for you and no crowds shout your name."
Membership
Robert Louis Stevenson was a member of LJR (Liberty, Justice, Reverence) Club.
Personality
Robert Louis Stevenson was a hypochondriac.
Physical Characteristics:
For all the swashbuckling adventurers and scary characters he brought to life, Robert Louis Stevenson was physically frail, often suffering from respiratory problems. He was very thin and he didn't have any extra energy.
Quotes from others about the person
Rebecca West: "Never had beauty been so forgotten; style was poisoned at the fount of thought by Carlyle, whose sentences were confused disasters like railway accidents, and by Herbert Spencer, who wrote as though he were the offspring of two Times leaders; among novelists only Robert Louis Stevenson loved words, and he had too prudent a care to water down his gruel to suit sick England's stomach."
Interests
traveling
Music & Bands
Schubert
Connections
The first love of the writer was a lady named Kate Drummond, who worked as a prostitute in a night tavern. Stephenson, being an inexperienced youth, was so carried away by this woman that he was about to marry. However, the writer’s father did not allow his son to marry Kate, who, according to Thomas, was not suitable for this role.
Later, on a trip to a French artists' colony in July 1876 with his cousin Bob, Stevenson met Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne, a married woman, an American, and ten years Stevenson's senior. The two were taken with one another, and Osbourne said she would be getting a divorce from her husband. In August 1879, Stevenson received a cable-gram from Fanny Osbourne, who by that time had rejoined her husband in California. With the impetuosity of one of his own fictional characters, Stevenson set off for America to find her. On August 18, he landed, sick, nearly penniless, in New York. From there he took an overland train journey in miserable conditions to California, where he nearly died.
After meeting with Fanny Osbourne in Monterey, and no doubt depressed at the uncertainty of her divorce, he went camping in the Santa Lucia mountains, where he lay sick for two nights until two frontiersmen found him and nursed him back to health. Still unwell, Stevenson moved to Monterey in December 1879 and thence to San Francisco, where he was ever near to death, continually fighting off his illness. When Stevenson had left Scotland so abruptly, this had temporarily estranged him from his parents. They were also upset about his relationship with a married woman. However, hearing of their son's dire circumstances, they cabled him enough money to save him from poverty. Fanny Osbourne obtained her divorce from her husband, and she and Stevenson were married on May 19, 1880, in San Francisco.
Father:
Thomas Stevenson
(July 22, 1818 - May 8, 1887)
Thomas Stevenson was a pioneering Scottish lighthouse designer and meteorologist, who designed over thirty lighthouses in and around Scotland, as well as the Stevenson screen used in meteorology.
Mother:
Margaret Isabella Stevenson
(1829 - 1897)
Spouse:
Fanny Stevenson
(March 10, 1840 - February 18, 1914)
Fanny Stevenson was an American magazine writer.
stepdaughter:
Isobel Osbourne
(1858 - 1953)
Isobel Osbourne was an American author and stepdaughter of Robert Louis Stevenson.
stepson:
Lloyd Osbourne
(April 7, 1868 - May 22, 1947)
Lloyd Osbourne was an American author and the stepson of Robert Louis Stevenson with whom he co-authored three books and provided input and ideas on others.
Robert Louis Stevenson: A Biography
The most authoritative, comprehensive, perceptive biography of R. L. Stevenson to date, using for the first time his collected correspondence. The short life of Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-94) was as adventurous as almost anything in his fiction: his travels, illness, struggles to become a writer, relationships with his volatile wife and stepfamily, friendships and quarrels have fascinated readers for over a century. In his time he was both engineer and aesthete, dutiful son and reckless lover, Scotsman and South Sea Islander, Covenanter and atheist.
