In terms of literary reputation, Robert Louis Stevenson had a distinctly mixed 20th century, but is doing better in the 21st. Following his death in 1894, he was internationally acclaimed as a writer of at least three imperishable novels (Treasure Island, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Kidnapped), a handful of great short stories (“Thrawn Janet” chief among them), and another handful of important essays, including “A Humble Remonstrance”, his response to Henry James’s “The Art of Fiction”. But, while various later writers (Proust, Nabokov, Borges) continued to sing his praises, the modernists as a whole – and the Bloomsbury Group in particular – thought that he looked old hat; his type of linear fiction prioritised “adventure” at the expense of character development and psychological insight.
Although these reservations didn’t stop his best books from selling well (thanks greatly to the effect of successful adaptations for stage and screen), it did mean that the various multi-volume editions of his work which appeared in the years following his death gradually crept higher and higher up the library shelves. In time, they were joined by the collected editions of other writers, such as Kipling and Galsworthy, who seemed to be on the wrong side of history.
For a while, it looked as though the final assessment would not be flattering to Stevenson. He was a desperately uneven writer, whose best books were a product of their time (extolling banal ideas of male valour), and whose reputation as a serious artist was glamourised, yes, but in a sense also compromised by the colourfully tragic drama of his life.
Cue postmodernism, a relaxation of collective snobbishness about literary genres, a great eight-volume edition of his brilliantly entertaining letters (Yale University Press, 1995) and a developing interest (by Nicholas Rankin and Claire Harman among others) in treating his biography not just as a fascinating individual story, but as an allegory of the immediately pre-modern moment. Although there is still a tendency to pigeonhole Stevenson as a children’s writer, his reputation within academies is now closer than it has been for many generations to his standing in the world of general readers. Which means among other things that Leo Damrosch’s new biography, which draws generously on the work of predecessors but adds its own sensible, sympathetic and thorough commentary, is very well timed.
The bare bones of Stevenson’s story are by now familiar to anyone with even a passing interest in him. He was born in Edinburgh in 1850, the sickly child of a famous lighthouse-building family, whose father, Thomas, was both leniently supportive of his son (he saved him from financial ruin on numerous occasions) and also a goad to his conscience: how could a life spent writing not seem inferior to the sheer hard work of building lighthouses around Scotland’s famously rugged coast? Furthermore, how could an irreligious son keep a God-fearing father’s respect? These tensions inevitably produced conflicts, but they also provided Stevenson with recurring structures in his fiction, where parent-child relationships (whether they be within an actual family, or between an older person and a younger Jim and Long John Silver, for instance) are always placed front and centre.
This parental influence was both confirmed and elaborated by that of his nanny Alison Cunningham, a fierce and fiercely loving Scottish Presbyterian, who filled his head with ideas about damnation and self-sacrifice. These helped to shape his thinking in direct ways, by encouraging a binary interpretation of human nature. And also indirect ways, by making him want to explode a binary view as unduly simplistic (see Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde). It all made for a childhood shaped by powerfully paradoxical forces, which in due course produced a predictably mixed character: highly strung but freedom loving; self-doubting but determined; hard working in pursuit of his own ends but reluctant to follow any predetermined path; grave but playful (“fiction is to the grown man what play is to the child”, he wrote in his essay “A Gossip on Romance”).
Although Stevenson resisted the idea that he might follow in his father’s footsteps and become an engineer, he did – after inattentively attending several secondary schools – at least gratify him by signing on at the University of Edinburgh and then studying for the bar. But just as he qualified as a lawyer (in 1875), he left for a break in Menton, France. The immediate and serious reason was poor health: although Stevenson was never actually diagnosed as tubercular, he showed many of the symptoms associated with that disease, and having spent the whole of his early life in the shadow of illness, he now faced adulthood at the same grim disadvantage.
By this stage, though, he had found a way of behaving that acknowledged his physical weakness (everyone who met him said how wraith-like he looked), and yet constantly challenged it: his first book, An Inland Voyage, was the account of a 200-mile trip that he took by boat from Antwerp to Pontoise, north of Paris, which required constant physical exertion.
Stevenson had always easily made friends and girlfriends during his Edinburgh days – his talk was extravagant and amusing, his manners and dress raffishly bohemian, and his energy infectious. But in the aftermath of his boat trip, his social world found its centre when he fell in love with the woman who would become his indispensable partner: Fanny Osbourne. Fanny was ten years older than Stevenson, originally from Indiana, and the wife of a promiscuous charmer, Sam, who had remained in the States when she and their two children – Belle and Sam Junior, who would later go by Lloyd – had come to France so that Fanny could study painting. In later years Fanny would often be criticised by Stevenson’s male friends, but it’s clear that their antipathy was often driven by jealousy, and that Fanny was in fact an ideal companion for Stevenson: tough, practical, physically attractive to him, and, although not “literary” in any conventional way, full of sound opinion (she later gave him advice about the structure of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde which helped turn a good story into a great book).
The saga of Stevenson’s courtship of Fanny is another well-known part of his story, but Damrosch tells it well, with an impressive sense of Fanny’s good qualities, and of the difficulties they overcame together: Fanny’s return to the West Coast of America to sort things out with husband Sam; Stevenson’s grief at her departure (after which he reprised his experience as an “inland castaway” by talking a tour of the Cévennes, which he soon wrote up as Travels with a Donkey); his parents’ disapproval of the relationship; his arduous trip to join Fanny in San Francisco (which produced two more short travel books); their eventual marriage and sojourn in the hills of the Sierras; and their return to Scotland together with the two children – where they were greeted with impressive warmth by his parents. (Several of Stevenson’s men friends were less welcoming of Fanny, especially the poet WE Henley, who would later break with him entirely.)
Stevenson can’t be said to have lived a settled life (his four last years in Samoa amounted to the longest time he ever lived in one place as an adult), but Fanny gave him a focus that now allowed his best work to begin. Before leaving Scotland (for Davos, first, again for reasons to do with his health, then France, then back to Britain and Bournemouth, where they lived in a house named for one of the Stevenson lighthouses – Skerryvore) Stevenson began Treasure Island. This was the book that changed everything for him, making his name and reducing his financial dependency on his parents.
The sheer excitement of the book’s story accounts for a good deal of its appeal, but its finest qualities are stylistic: the prose is brilliantly lithe and accurate, proceeding by a series of “incremental pulses” that generate a powerful kinetic energy, and the kind of simplicity that can only be achieved by skilfully managed economies of language. Henry James, who became a good friend of Stevenson and Fanny during their time in Bournemouth, and who – no surprise! – emerges from Damrosch’s pages as marvellously sensitive to the strengths of their relationship as well as to the merits of Stevenson’s work, was quick to realise this. In his very first letter to Stevenson he assures him of his “hearty sympathy, charged with the assurance of my enjoyment of everything you write”.
Treasure Island made Stevenson famous, but it did not mark the beginning of a smooth writerly ascent. Although he produced a torrent of new writing in Skerryvore – compensating, perhaps, for the relative inactivity caused by illness in the years immediately preceding – it was followed by numerous false starts and failures (as well as the durable triumphs of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Kidnapped), and by even greater geographic dislocations, culminating in his departure for the South Seas following his father’s death in 1873. Throughout this time, the tensions of his formative influences rarely relaxed their grip: Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde deepens his exploration of the dividedness he had felt as a child to the point at which it becomes proto-Freudian; Kidnapped mines the romantic feelings about Scotland’s history that were first unveiled to him by his nanny; and his late unfinished masterpiece Weir of Hermiston, which he was writing in Samoa at the time of his death, revisits yet again the subject of father-son conflicts.
Stevenson died aged just 44, but the extraordinary drama of his life itself deserves to be considered as a kind of masterpiece. Damrosch’s telling breaks new ground in the sense that it quotes more widely and generously than previous biographies, includes many rarely seen illustrations, and extends an unusual and likeable welcome to Fanny. But its most significant achievement is to make a wise judgement about what continues to matter in Stevenson’s work, and to catch the brilliance and flair of his engagement with other people. Stevenson was a wonderful man and at his best a great writer, and this valuable book deserves to succeed in its aim of winning him “still more” readers, including those who might otherwise not consider him seriously because he’s so much fun.
Andrew Motion is a former poet laureate. His books include “Silver: Return to Treasure Island” (Jonathan Cape)
Storyteller: The life of Robert Louis Stevenson
Leo Damrosch
Yale University Press, 584pp, £25
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[See also: Whit Stillman: “Why isn’t everyone obsessed with dancing?”]
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This article appears in the 03 Sep 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Age of Deportation
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