|
Robert Louis Stevenson was born in Edinburgh on the 13th of November in 1850. The son of a successful civil engineer, he was expected to follow the family profession, but finally was allowed to study law at Edinburgh University. Stevenson reacted violently against the Presbyterian respectability of the city´s professional classes and this led to painful clashes with his parents. In his early twenties he became afflicted with a severe respiratory illness from which he was to suffer for the rest of his life; it was at this time that he determined to become a professional writer. In 1879 he nearly killed himself travelling to California to marryy Fanny Osbourne, an American ten years senior. Together they continued his search for a climate kind to his fragile health, eventually settling in Samoa, where he died of cerebral haemorrhage on the third of December in 1894.
Stevenson´s Calvinistic upbringing gave him a preoccupation with predestination and a fascination with the presence of the evil. In \"Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde\" (1886) he explores the darker side of the human psyche, and the character of the Master in \"The Master of Ballantrae\"(1889) was intended to be \"all I know of the devil\". Stevenson began his literary career as an essayist and travel-writer, but the success of \"Treasure Island\"(1883) and \"Kidnapped\" (1886) established his reputation for tales of action and adventure. As Walter Allen comments in The English Novel: \"His rediscovery of the art of narrative, of conscious and cunning calculation in telling a story so that the maximum effect of clarity and suspense is achieved, meant the birth of the novel of action as we know it.\" \"Kidnapped\" and \"The Master of Ballantrae\" also reveal his knowledge and feeling for the Scottish cultural past. During the last years of his life Robert Louis Stevenson´s creative range developed considerably. At the time of his death he was working on \"Weir of Hermiston\", at once a romantic historical novel and an emotional reworking of one of his most distressing experience, the conflict between father and son.
|
