Customer Reviews

Robert Louis Stevenson

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.