Robert Louis Stevenson
The name Robert Louis Stevenson is synonymous with adventure, romance, and the exotic—qualities that characterized the author’s life as well as his fiction. Born in Edinburgh on November 13, 1850, Stevenson contracted in his early years what was probably tuberculosis, a condition that would cause repeated bouts of illness throughout his life. But frequent confinement to the sickbed did not stifle the child’s imagination. The young boy wrote tales based on biblical passages and Scottish history and soon gained a reputation as a storyteller.
In 1867 Stevenson enrolled in Edinburgh University. His family expected that he would join the distinguished line of Stevenson engineers; instead he chose to study the law. But conventional study was, he later claimed, the farthest thing from his mind. “To play the fiddle, to know a good cigar, or to speak with ease and opportunity to all varieties of men”—these were Stevenson’s youthful pursuits, which he sought despite academic and familial consequences.
This self-professed idler was a devoted student of the curriculum he devised for himself. Sometimes on the verge of grave illness, Stevenson wandered through the wilder quarters of Edinburgh, and worked at honing his writing skills by imitating his favorite authors, among them Defoe, Hazlitt, and Montaigne. In 1875 he passed the bar exam, but rather than take up legal practice, he set out for the European continent; his time there is recounted in early essays and travel narratives. While in France Stevenson fell in love with Fanny Osbourne, a married American woman ten years his senior. He joined Fanny in the United States in 1879. Upon her divorce in 1880 she and Stevenson were married; they lived for a short time afterward in northern California.
Stevenson then returned to Edinburgh with Fanny and her son from her first marriage, Lloyd Osbourne. Stevenson’s health was so fragile for the next several years that sometimes he was bedridden; at other times he and his family traveled to the south of France and Switzerland in hopes of restoring his well-being. As in his youth, sickness galvanized rather than diminished his imagination; during this period he composed such classics as Treasure Island (1883), A Child’s Garden of Verses (1885), and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Kidnapped (both 1886). From 1884 to 1887 the family lived in Bournemouth, a resort on England’s south coast.
After his father’s death in 1887, Stevenson and his mother, wife, and stepson moved to America. The author’s vagabond spirit and quest for better health led the family on a South Seas voyage that would prove to be his greatest adventure; in 1888 they visited the islands of the Marquesas, Tahiti, and Hawaii. During the journey Stevenson suffered a lung hemorrhage, and the family settled in Samoa to attend to his failing health. Stevenson’s works of the period include In the South Seas (1890), which chronicles the clash between Eastern and Western cultures and champion the Samoan people; these writings shocked his friends in Scotland, drew fire from local warring political factions, and nearly provoked his banishment from Samoa.
As Stevenson’s health seriously worsened he felt nostalgia for his native country, although he knew he would not survive a voyage home to Scotland. He collapsed from a brain hemorrhage while at work on his unfinished novel Weir of Hermiston and died on December 3, 1894, in Samoa.