Robert Louis Stevenson: A Biography (Text Only Edition)

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He returned home the following spring. In July he was called to the Scottish bar, but he never practiced. Stevenson was frequently abroad, most often in France.

His career as a writer developed slowly. It was these early essays, carefully wrought, quizzically meditative in tone, and unusual in sensibility, that first drew attention to Stevenson as a writer. Stephen brought Stevenson into contact with Edmund Gosse, the poet and critic, who became a good friend. Later, when in Edinburgh, Stephen introduced Stevenson to the writer W.

In Stevenson met Fanny Vandegrift Osbourne, an American lady separated from her husband, and the two fell in love. Stevenson reached California ill and penniless the record of his arduous journey appeared later in The Amateur Emigrant, , and Across the Plains, His adventures, which included coming very near death and eking out a precarious living in Monterey and San Francisco, culminated in marriage to Fanny Osbourne who was by then divorced from her first husband early in About the same time a telegram from his relenting father offered much-needed financial support, and, after a honeymoon by an abandoned silver mine recorded in The Silverado Squatters , , the couple sailed for Scotland to achieve reconciliation with the Thomas Stevensons.

Soon after his return, Stevenson, accompanied by his wife and his stepson, Lloyd Osbourne, went, on medical advice he had tuberculosis , to Davos, Switzerland. The family left there in April 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 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.

1850 - 1894

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.

The Robert Louis Stevenson Archive

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.

Robert Louis Stevenson Biographies and Biographical Studies

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.

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.

Early life

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. The reaction against him set in soon after his death: We welcome suggested improvements to any of our articles. You can make it easier for us to review and, hopefully, publish your contribution by keeping a few points in mind.

Your contribution may be further edited by our staff, and its publication is subject to our final approval. His wife Fanny Vandegrift Osbourne, whom he married in , was a great support in his adventurous and arduous life. Stevenson made several trips to the Kingdom of Hawaii and became a good friend of King David Kalakaua with whom Stevenson spent much time.

Stevenson also became best friends with the king's niece Princess Victoria Kaiulani, also of Scottish heritage. Since the tragic deaths of both Stevenson and Kaiulani, historians have debated the true nature of their relationship as to whether or not they had romantic feelings for each other. Because of the age difference, such stories have often been discredited. In , Stevenson travelled to the island of Molokai just weeks after the death of Father Damien. He spent twelve days at the missionary priest's residence, Bishop Home at Kalawao. Stevenson taught the local girls to play croquet. When Congregationalist and Presbyterian ministers began to defame Father Damien out of spite for his Catholicism, Stevenson wrote one of his most famous essays in defence of the life and work of the missionary priest.

Stevenson died of a cerebral hemorrhage in Vailima in Samoa, aged In his will, he bequeathed his birthday to a little girl, Annie Ide, who had been born on Christmas Day. It was originally called The Sea-Cook. This novel presents the Wars of the Roses, as it were, in miniature.

Catriona , also known as David Balfour , is a sequel, telling of Balfour's further adventures. Hyde , a short novel about a dual personality much depicted in Plays and films, also influential in the growth of understanding of the subconscious mind through its treatment of a kind and intelligent physician who turns into a psychopathic monster after imbibing a drug intended to separate good from evil in a personality. A tontine is a group life-insurance policy in which the last survivor gets all the insurance.

Both in the novel and in real life, it is an incentive to murder, and no longer legal in most countries. Includes such favourites as "My Shadow" and "The Lamplighter".

Often thought to represent a positive reflection of the author's sickly childhood. It tells of commissioning one of the first sleeping bags. An account of the first leg of his journey to California, by ship from Europe to New York.

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