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Birth
Robert Lewis (later: “Louis”) Balfour Stevenson was born in Edinburgh on 13 November 1850.His father Thomas belonged to a family of engineers who had built many of the deep-sea lighthouses around the rocky coast of Scotland. His mother, Margaret Isabella Balfour, came from a family of lawyers and church ministers. -
1857
In 1857 the family moved to 17 Heriot Row, a solid, respectable house in Edinburgh’s New Town. -
Early Published Works
In the university’s summer vacations he went to France to be in the company of other young artists, both writers and painters. His first published work was an essay called “Roads”, and his first published volumes were works of travel writing. -
1867
At the age of seventeen he enrolled at Edinburgh University to study engineering, with the aim – his father hoped – of following him in the family firm. However, he abandoned this course of studies and made the compromise of studying law. He “passed advocate” in 1875 but did not practice since by now he knew he wanted to be a writer. -
Meeting with Fanny, Journey to California, Marriage
The 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. -
Early Published Works
His first published volume, An Inland Voyage (1878), is an account of the journey he made by canoe from Antwerp to northern France, in which prominence is given to the author and his thoughts. -
Early Published Works
A companion work, Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes (1879), gives us more of his thoughts on life and human society and continues in consolidating the image of the debonair narrator that we also find in his essays and letters (which can be classed among his best works). -
Meeting with Fanny, Journey to California, Marriage
Two years later she returned to California and a year after that, in August 1879, RLS set out on the long journey to join her. This experience was to be the subject of his next large-scale work The Amateur Emigrant -
Meeting with Fanny, Journey to California, Marriage
The Amateur Emigrant (written 1879-80, published in part in 1892 and in full in 1895), 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. -
Marriage
After Fanny obtained a divorce, she and RLS were married in San Francisco in May 1880. Concluding this first period of writing based closely on his own direct experiences is The Silverado Squatters (1883), an account of their three week honeymoon at an abandoned silver mine in California. -
Short Stories
Stevenson has an important place in the history of the short story in the British Isles: the form had been elaborated and developed in America, France and Russia from the mid-19th century, but it was Stevenson who initiated the British tradition. -
Short Stories
His 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” (Menikoff 1990, p. 342). -
Novel
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. -
Death
The authorial persona had changed from the debonair flâneur of the early works, but retained a joy in his craft and a consciousness in the shaping of his own life. He died in December 1894 and even shaped the manner of his burial: as he had wished, he was buried at the top of Mount Vaea above his home on Samoa. Appropriately it was a part of his own short poem, “Requiem” (from an 1887 collection), that was written on his tomb. -
After death
Stevenson’s establishes a personal relationship with the reader, and creates a sense of wonder through his brilliant style and his adoption and manipulation of a variety of genres. Writing when the period of the three-volume novel was coming to an end, he seems to have written everything: plays, poems, essays, literary criticism, literary theory, biography, travelogue, reportage, romances, boys’ adventure stories, fantasies, fables, and short stories.
