WORKS OUTLINE

        His meeting with his future wife, Fanny, was to change the rest of his life. They met immediately after his 'inland voyage', in September 1876 at Grez, a riverside village south-east of Paris; he was twenty-five, and she was thirty-six, an independent American ‘new woman’, separated from her husband and with two children. Two years later she decided to obtain a divorce and Stevenson set out for California. His own experiences continue to be the subject of his next large-scale work The Amateur Emigrant(written 1879-80, published 1894), an account of this journey to California, which Noble (1985: 14) considers his finest work. In this work of perceptive reportage and open-minded and humane observation the voice is less buoyant and does not avoid observation of hardship and suffering. The light-hearted paradoxes and confidential address to the reader of the essays written a few years before (1876-77) and then published as Virginibus Puerisque (1881) continue in the creation of his original debonair authorial persona. Concluding this first period of writing based closely on his own direct experiences is The Silverado Squatters (1883), an account of his three week honeymoon at an abandoned silver mine in California.
 
 
 

         Stevenson’s first published fictional narrative was ‘A Lodging for the Night’ (1877), a short story originally published in a magazine, like other early narrative works, such as ‘The Sire De Malétroit’s Door’ (1877), ‘Providence and the Guitar’ (1878), and ‘The Pavilion on the Links’ (1880, considered by Conan Doyle in 1890 as ‘the high-water mark of [Stevenson’s] genius’ and ‘the first short story in the world’, qu. Menikoff 1990: 342). These four tales were collected in a volume entitled New Arabian Nights in 1882, preceded by the seven linked stories originally called ‘Latter-Day Arabian Nights’ when published in a magazine in 1878. This collection is seen as the starting point for the history of the English short story by Barry Menikoff (1987: 126). The Arabian stories were described by critics of the time as ‘fantastic stories of adventure’, ‘grotesque romances’ ‘in which the analytic mind loses itself’ (Maixner 1981: 117, 120), and are seen by Chesterton (1927: 169) as ‘unequalled’ and ‘the most unique of his works’. They have an affinity with the Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in their setting in the labyrinthine modern city, and the subject matter of crimes and guilty secrets involving respectable members of society. Stevenson continued to write short stories all his life, and notable titles include: ‘Thrawn Janet’ (1881), ‘The Merry Men’ (1882), ‘The Treasure of Franchard’ (1883), ‘Markheim’ (1885), which, being a narrative of the Double, has certain affinities with Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, ‘Olalla’ (1885), which like Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde originated in a dream and which also deals with the possibility of degeneration. The above short narratives were all collected in The Merry Men and Other Tales and Fables in 1887.

        ‘Olalla’ was written in the period of just over two years (1885-7) when Stevenson and Fanny were living in Bournmouth. Despite problems of health and finances, this was a period of meetings with Henry James, W.E. Henley and other literary figures, and when he wrote the long short-story (published as a single volume), his ‘breakthrough book’, the Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886).

        Another collection Island Nights’ Entertainments, tales with a South Sea setting, was published in 1893, including ‘The Bottle Imp’ (1891), ‘The Beach of Falesà’ (1892, a long short story of the same length as Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde), and ‘The Isle of Voices’ (1893).
 
 
 

         Another fortuitous turning-point in Stevenson’s life had occurred when on holiday in Scotland in the summer of 1881. The cold rainy weather forced the family to amuse themselves indoors, and one day Stevenson and his twelve-year-old stepson, Lloyd (Fanny’s son by her first marriage), drew, coloured and annotated the map of an imaginary ‘Treasure Island’. The map stimulated Stevenson’s imagination and, ‘On a chill September morning, by the cheek of a brisk fire’ he began to write a story based on it as an entertainment for the rest of the family. Treasure Island (published in book form in 1883) marks the beginning of his popularity and his career as a profitable writer, it was his first volume-length fictional narrative, and the first of his writings ‘for children’ (or rather, the first of writings manipulating the genres associated with children). Later works that fit into this category are A Child’s Garden of Verses (1885), The Black Arrow (1883), Kidnapped (1886) and its continuation Catriona (1893). The four narrative works mentioned in this paragraph, though they all have youthful protagonists and were all first published in magazines for young people, are also clearly intended for adult readers. The last three, based on careful documentary research, are fictions exploring history and culture; and the last two are interesting studies of Scottish culture and could also be placed in the following section.
 
 
 

        Prince Otto (1885), his second full-length narrative, is defined by Andrew Lang as ‘a philosophical-humouristical-psychological fantasy’ (qu. Maixner 1981: 181). The action is provocatively set in the imaginary state of Grünewald, an unusual choice for Stevenson, and it was to historical Scotland (which had already provided the setting for Kidnapped and Catriona) that he turned for his next full-length ‘adult’ story, The Master of Ballantrae (1889). This is a Doubles narrative in which the brothers James and Henry have similarities with Jekyll and Hyde, not only in their initials, but also because of the mixed personality of the ‘good’ character, the constant return of the persecuting Double, and the simultaneous death of the two antagonists. Both Calvino and Brecht consider it to be the best of his works, and it is highly praised by writers as diverse as Henry James, Walter Benjamin and André Gide. The novel that he was working on when he died, Weir of Hermiston (published incomplete and posthumously in 1896), is also set in Scotland in the not-too-distant past and has also been often praised and seen as Stevenson’s masterpiece. The centre of the story is the difficult relationship of an authoritarian father and a son who has to assert his own identity (a theme present in many of Stevenson’s works - and we may remember that Hyde is presented in some ways as Jekyll’s son - and clearly a way he used of exploring and coming to terms with his difficult relationship with his own father).
 
 
 

         This very Scottish romance was written when Stevenson was far away on the other side of the world. His decision to sail around the Pacific in 1888, living on various islands for short periods, then setting off again (all the time collecting material for an anthropological and historical work on the South Seas which was never fully completed), was another turning point in his life. In 1889 he and his extended family arrived at the port of Apia in the Samoan islands and they decided to build a house and settle. This choice brought him health, distance from the distractions of literary circles, and went towards the creation of his mature literary persona: the traveller, the exile, very aware of the harsh sides of life but also celebrating the joy in his own skill as a weaver of words and teller of tales. It also acted as a new stimulus to his imagination. He wrote about the Pacific islands in several of his later works: Island Nights’ Entertainments already referred to; In the South Seas (published 1896), essays that would have gone towards the large work on the area that he planned; and two other narratives with a South Sea setting: The Wrecker (1892), and The Ebb-Tide (1894). The former is a mystery adventure set in various places over the globe but centred in the South Seas (indeed at Midway Island, Latitude 0°) with some dark tones, especially in the fruitless search for treasure and the massacre of a ship’s crew (for quite understandable reasons!). The Ebb-Tide (like ‘The Beach of Falesà’) gives a realistic picture of the degenerate European traders and riffraff who inhabited the ports of the Pacific islands. These South Sea narratives mark a definite move towards a more harsh and grim realism (Stevenson himself (qu. Maixner 1981: 452) acknowledges affinities of The Ebb-Tide with the work of Zola).