Robert Louis Stevenson: A Biography - Softcover

Harman, Claire

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0007113226 ISBN 13: 9780007113224

Publisher: Harper Perennial, 2010

Synopsis

The most authoritative, comprehensive, perceptive biography of R. L. Stevenson to date, using for the first time his collected correspondence which has been unavailable to all previous writers.The short life of Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-94) was as adventurous as almost anything in his fiction: his travels, illness, struggles to become a writer, relationships with his volatile wife and step-family, friendships and quarrels have fascinated readers for over a century. In his time he was both engineer and aesthete, dutiful son and reckless lover, Scotsman and South Sea Islander, Covenanter and atheist. Stevensons books, including Treasure Island, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Kidnapped, have achieved world fame; others The Master of Ballantrae, A Childs Garden of Verses, Travels with a Donkey remain all-time favourites. His unique gift for storytelling and dramatic characterisation has meant that some of his characters live in the consciousness even of those who have never read his work: Long John Silver, with his wooden leg and his parrot, is more real to most people than any historical pirate, while Jekyll and Hyde has become a universally recognised term for a split personality.No biography has yet done justice to the complex, brilliant and troubled man who was responsible for so many remarkable creations. His interest in psychology, genetics, technology and feminism anticipated the concerns of the next century, while his experiments in narrative technique inspired post-modern innovators such as Borges and Nabokov. Stevenson's recently collected correspondence shows him to have been the least Victorian of Victorian writers, a man of humour, resilience and strongly unconventional views. With access to this and much previously unpublished material, Claire Harman, the acclaimed biographer of Sylvia Townsend Warner and Fanny Burney, has written the most authoritative, comprehensive and perceptive portrait of RLS to date.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0007113226
• ISBN 13: 9780007113224
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 448