Tales of the South Seas
Island Landfalls: The Ebb-Tide: The Wrecker
Robert Louis StevensonEdited by Jenni Calder
Available as eBook
Introduced by Jenni Calder
Island Landfalls · The Wrecker · The Ebb-Tide
Driven to the South Seas by ill health, Stevenson could not close his eyes to the impact of colonialism, the ‘stirabout of epochs and races, barbarisms and civilisations, virtues and crimes’. Setting his imaginative writings within the social and political contexts of his letters and essays from the South Seas, reveals the deepening and broadening of Stevenson’s genius and his growing awareness of and anger at white exploitation. It was a society in which his love of adventure, his awareness of the extremes of human nature, and his fascination with good and evil, could find full release.
Tales of the South Seas gathers together all of Stevenson’s South Sea fiction and a selection of prose and letters provides not only a vivid portrait of a colourful and exotic world, but also a full and rounded picture of a superb writer at the height of his powers.
Robert Louis StevensonEdited by Jenni Calder
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-94) was a Scottish novelist, poet and essayist who achieved worldwide acclaim for Treasure Island and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Born and educated in Edinburgh, Stevenson began with essays, short stories and travel writing, most notably Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes (1879). He is best remembered for his first novel Treasure Island (1883) and for The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886). The great Scottish novels followed, with Kidnapped (1886), The Master of Ballantrae (1889), and Weir of Hermiston (1893), which was left unfinished at his death. Catriona (1893), was always planned as the immediate sequel to Kidnapped, but had been delayed in the writing. Stevenson spent seven years in the South Seas, settling for the last five on the island of Upolu in Samoa, where he died suddenly from a cerebral stroke at the age of forty-four.