Robert Louis Stevenson

Robert Louis Stevenson (Edinburgh, 1850 - Vailima, Samoa, 1894) was a Scottish novelist, short-story writer, poet and essayist who wrote in English during the second half of the nineteenth century. Placed at the margins of late Romanticism, his work is read today mainly for its adventure and mystery novels, and his influence reaches writers as different as Joseph Conrad, G. K. Chesterton and Jorge Luis Borges.

He was born at 8 Howard Place, the only child of Thomas Stevenson, a lighthouse engineer, and Margaret Balfour. His father's family had built lighthouses for generations, and young Robert was expected to follow the same path. His health was fragile from early childhood. Recurring bronchial illnesses kept him in bed for long periods and he was often taught by private tutors. His nurse, Alison Cunningham, known as Cummy, read him the Bible and John Bunyan while he was ill, but she also told him Calvinist tales that gave him nightmares and left him with a lasting fascination for the dark side of things. He began writing stories and verses early, and at sixteen his father paid for the printing of his first book, The Pentland Rising, about a rising of the Covenanters.

He enrolled in engineering at the University of Edinburgh but switched to law. He qualified to practise but showed little talent for it, since his real interest lay in language and writing. After a stay in Suffolk he began placing essays in London periodicals such as the Cornhill Magazine. The first signs of tuberculosis sent him travelling across the Continent, and for a time he lived in an artists' colony near Fontainebleau. From those years come An Inland Voyage and Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes, two travel books whose humour owes much to Laurence Sterne. In 1876, in Grez, he met Fanny Osbourne, an American woman who was separated and had two children, and in 1879 he followed her to California.

His best-known works are Treasure Island, published in 1883, and Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, from 1886, a psychological novel about a divided personality that is often read as a work of horror. He also wrote historical novels in the manner of Walter Scott, among them Kidnapped. His prose is clear and quick-paced, with a restrained humour, and his essays on the structure of the adventure novel, though brief, proved influential.

In 1890 he settled in Samoa. Troubled by the growing European and American presence in the South Seas, his writing grew darker and more realistic. He died in 1894 at his home in Vailima, aged forty-four. He was celebrated in his lifetime, and his critical reputation fluctuated after his death, though he is widely admired today. His novels and stories have been adapted many times for cinema and television, and in 2018 he ranked as the twenty-sixth most translated author in the world, just behind Dickens.