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Selected and introduced by Jenni Calder
Ill health drove Robert Louis Stevenson from Scotland; the urge for new and adventurous places drew him to the Pacific. There were those at home who would have been happier to see him purely as a spinner of the picturesque, but Stevenson could not close his eyes to the impact of colonialism, the ‘stir-about of epochs and races, barbarisms and civilizations, virtues and crimes’.
This collection sets three of his imaginative works -The Bottle Imp, The Isle of Voices, and The Beach of Falesa - within the social and political contexts of Stevenson’s letters and essays from the South Seas. Island ambience, the clash of cultures, moral ambiguities, all are there, and so too is Stevenson’s swift narrative control, giving a true modernity to his prose.
Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-94) was a Scottish novelist, poet and essayist who achieved worldwide acclaim for Treasure Islandand 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.