Robert Louis Stevenson: A Biography

Robert Louis Stevenson: A Biography
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The most authoritative, comprehensive, perceptive biography of R. L. Stevenson to date, using for the first time his collected correspondence – which has been unavailable to all previous writers.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 step-family, 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. Stevenson’s books, including ‘Treasure Island’, ‘The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’ and ‘Kidnapped’, have achieved world fame; others – ‘The Master of Ballantrae’, ‘A Child’s Garden of Verses’, ‘Travels with a Donkey’ – remain all-time favourites. His unique gift for storytelling and dramatic characterisation has meant that some of his characters live in the consciousness even of those who have never read his work: Long John Silver, with his wooden leg and his parrot, is more real to most people than any historical pirate, while ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ has become a universally recognised term for a split personality.No biography has yet done justice to the complex, brilliant and troubled man who was responsible for so many remarkable creations. His interest in psychology, genetics, technology and feminism anticipated the concerns of the next century, while his experiments in narrative technique inspired post-modern innovators such as Borges and Nabokov. Stevenson's recently collected correspondence shows him to have been the least ‘Victorian’ of Victorian writers, a man of humour, resilience and strongly unconventional views. With access to this and much previously unpublished material, Claire Harman, the acclaimed biographer of Sylvia Townsend Warner and Fanny Burney, has written the most authoritative, comprehensive and perceptive portrait of ‘RLS’ to date.

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Claire Harman. Robert Louis Stevenson: A Biography

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. A Biography

Dedication

Contents

Preface

1 BARON BROADNOSE

2 VELVET COAT

3 THE CARELESS INFIDEL

4 AH WELLESS

5 STENNIS FRÈRE

6 THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT

7 THE PROFESSIONAL SICKIST

8 UXORIOUS BILLY

9 A WEEVIL IN A BISCUIT

10 THE DREAMER

11 BELOW ZERO

12 ONA

13 TUSI TALA

14 THE TAME CELEBRITY

POSTSCRIPTS

Select Bibliography

ARTICLES AND ESSAYS ABOUT STEVENSON

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Notes

Praise

By the Same Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Отрывок из книги

CLAIRE HARMAN

dear companion

.....

Thomas and Margaret were married about a year after they first met, on a date in August deliberately chosen to coincide with the anniversary of her father’s ordination (he, naturally, performed the ceremony). Margaret proved a most devoted wife to Thomas Stevenson, subservient to his wishes and interests, protective of his well-being, mainstay of his morale. Her chief talent, Louis declared, in one of his very few analytical remarks about his mother, was for organisation, and she was good at identifying and diverting possible starting points of domestic tension. This presumably came of years dealing with her husband’s sporadic dips into melancholia, and was a technique that her son would emulate closely in his dealings with an equally volatile spouse.

Although she became, in later life, a remarkably enthusiastic and adventurous traveller, tolerant of discomforts and extreme temperatures, game for anything, Margaret Stevenson spent her youth half in and half out of a sort of vaporous decline. She was encouraged in this first by a valetudinarian father, himself a sufferer from weak lungs, then by her hypochondriac husband. All through her son’s childhood, she varied between high spirits and sickliness: her chest was weak, her heart; she must rest, she must take the waters. She was only twenty-one when the baby was born, but stayed in bed most mornings and was unable to play or go out with him when she was up. Most of the active side of mothering was left to the child’s nurses, yet there were welcome, if perplexing, surges of energy: one of Stevenson’s earliest memories was of his mother rushing him up the stairs at their house in Inverleith Terrace to see his grandfather, as excitable and skittish as a girl.

.....

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