Robert Louis Stevenson [Illustrated] [Hardcover]

Claire Harman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 7, 2005

The most authoritative, comprehensive, perceptive biography of R. L. Stevenson to date, using for the first time his collected correspondence (unavailable to 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 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. 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 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 With access to this and much previously unpublished material, Claire Harman, the acclaimed biographer of Sylvia Townsend Warner and Fanny Burney, has written the most authoritative, comprehensive and perceptive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.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Claire Harman's first book, a biography of the novelist Sylvia Townsend Warner, was published by Chatto & Windus in 1989 and won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for 'a book of value from a writer of growing stature'. Her second, a life of Fanny Burney (2000), published by HarperCollins, was shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize. She has edited Warner's Collected Poems (1982) and Diaries (1994) as well as works by Robert Louis Stevenson. Harman worked for the literary periodical PN Review in the 1980s and has taught at the universities of Manchester and Oxford. She has written for all the major British literary papers and currently teaches a course in creative writing at Columbia University's School of the Arts.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 448 pages
• Publisher: Harper Collins; illustrated edition edition (February 7, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0007113218
• ISBN-13: 978-0007113217
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.5 x 1.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.9 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,312,631 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Claire Harman is the award-winning author of three major literary biographies, Sylvia Townsend Warner (1989), Fanny Burney (2000), Robert Louis Stevenson (2005) and of Jane's Fame: How Jane Austen Comquered the World (2009), a biographical study of Jane Austen's enduring appeal. She is the editor of Sylvia Townsend Warner's poems and diaries and of stories and essays by Robert Louis Stevenson, among other works. Claire teaches Creative Writing at Columbia University in New York City and writes regularly for the literary press on both sides of the Atlantic. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2006.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Jekyll and Hyde of Scotland and Samoa, April 30, 2006

By 

Shalom Freedman "Shalom Freedman" (Jerusalem,Israel) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Robert Louis Stevenson (Hardcover)

Claire Harman in her introduction to this work speaks about how Stevenson's work has not been accepted by school curricula in the English speaking world. I find that odd since in Troy New York many years ago Miss McGovern led us through 'Treasure Island'. And I believe a couple of years later we were also given 'Kidnappeed' to read. Nonetheless it is fair to say that Stevenson despite 'Jekyll and Hyde' "A Child's Garden of Verses" "Kidnapped" and "Treasure Island" has not been given as high a literary place as contemporaries whose works were less popular. And this when later on Borges and Nabakov other 'foreign writers' would come to hold him in the highest literary esteem.

Harman says that Stevenson was a hard- working, devoted writer who loved 'starting books' more than finishing them, and who thus left behind many incomplete works. She says he was a writer obsessed by the theme of the 'double' the Jekyll and Hyde also in himself.

The only son of two devoted parents he was sickly as a child. And in fact his whole life involves a moving from place to place to find a place of health. Despite the bad health, the suspected tuberculosis Stevenson worked and was recognized in his own time as a most brilliant writer of the greatest possible promise. But many of his contemporaries could not see why he wasted his time on the works he did. He too seemingly did not know the real value of his work. He did not take seriously 'Treasure Island' which he began by drawing a treasure- map for his stepson. The work he most took seriously a novel is not read or even heard of today.

Stevenson fell in love with a mother-of- two separated from her husband. He pursued his Fanny and together they made a new and improbable life on Samoa. His friends despised her as common, but Harman defends her as having been exemplary in caring for Stevenson in and through his final illness.

This is an informative life of one of the most important contributors to English literature in the nineteenth century-who was of course a Scot through and through as is shown in a number of his most important works.