The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson

by Robert Louis Stevenson

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408 pages, Paperback

Published September 27, 2006

About the author

Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson was a Scottish novelist, poet, and travel writer, and a leading representative of English literature. He was greatly admired by many authors, including Jorge Luis Borges, Ernest Hemingway, Rudyard Kipling and Vladimir Nabokov.

Most modernist writers dismissed him, however, because he was popular and did not write within their narrow definition of literature. It is only recently that critics have begun to look beyond Stevenson's popularity and allow him a place in the Western canon.

Reviews

[Jo Walton]

When you read somebody's letters, letters written over a lifetime, you live with them and come to know them, their quirks and habits and turn of mind. It doesn't hide their faults, indeed, often it brings their faults to the fore, but at the end of a volume of letters you either love or hate the author. With RLS it was love, despite everything.

This edition has biographical explanation by Sidney Colson, a close friend and frequent addressee of the letters, and it was done very close to the time of Stevenson's death. A modern edition would be more interesting, and would expurgate different things. I've read the Forster biography of Fanny, RLS's wife, which helped fill out details Colson elides. Nevertheless. a modern edition wouldn't be this long or indulgent, and that was a lot of what I enjoyed.

These are not burning letters about literature and life like the Sand/Flaubert correspondence, or like the Barrett/Browning one. But they're the portrait of a writer disabled by sickness and trying to find a way and a place to write what he wants to write, and as such of interest.

[Jim Jones · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have always loved RLS' writing. But sometimes meeting your idols can be disappointing. I doubt that would be the case here. RLS' letters only confirm to me that he was man I would have instantly liked, as well as a man who lived an amazing life just as he created amazing art. In these letters I was shocked by his humility and entertained by his humor. His friendship with Henry James surprised me--two more disparate writers I can barely imagine! RLS is someone I wish I could have been seated next to at a dinner party!