Dreams of Exile: Robert Louis Stevenson: A Biography

by Ian Bell

"Fiction is to grown men what play is to the child," Robert Louis Stevenson once said in a statement that perfectly captures the magic of his own fiction. Immensely popular during his brief life - he died in 1894 at the age of forty-four - he has never lacked for readers since.

In the century that followed his death, many biographies have been written, each with its own image of R.L.S.: the sickly, dreaming child; the Bohemian dandy outraging Victorian Edinburgh; the romantic wanderer leading his donkey through the wilds of the Cevennes; the frail genius doomed to die young. For some, he is the man of action avid for experience, filled with wanderlust; for others, the writer of stories beloved by children and familiar from innumerable film and television dramas. Still others know him as the essayist whose skills matched William Hazlitt's and the novelist to whom even Henry James deferred. All of these are R.L.S., but none is the full Stevenson. Now, in this new and acclaimed biography, Ian Bell attempts to see Stevenson whole, to trace the line of descent from the son of Calvinist engineers to the man who ended his days as Tusitala among the Samoan islanders.

Understanding that for Stevenson geography mattered, Bell sets out to discover the complete man through the places he lived and the people he lived among as well as through the books that poured from him during his all-too-short literary life. Dreams of Exile is both literary biography and travel narrative. It follows Stevenson's development as an artist and as a man by following his often chaotic progress from continent to continent, in good health and in bad, in poverty and in wealth. Along the way, it reveals his often tortured relations with his family, his robust sexuality, and the mystery of his stormy marriage to a woman many years his senior. But perhaps Bell's most important contribution is to rescue R.L.S. from the many conflicting and often romanticized images that have continued to surround him.

Genres: Biography, Nonfiction, Scotland

296 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1992

About the author

Ian Bell was a Scottish journalist who was born and raised in Edinburgh and educated at Edinburgh University. He was an advocate of Scottish independence.

He was the literary editor of The Scotsman before becoming Scottish editor of The Observer. He also wrote for The Herald, The Sunday Herald, The Scotsman, the Daily Record, the Irish Times, and The Times Literary Supplement. He won the Orwell Prize for political journalism in 1997 and was named columnist of the year at the Scottish Press Awards 2012.

Bell wrote two volumes of a biography of Bob Dylan and one of Robert Louis Stevenson, Dreams of Exile, which the Saltire Society awarded Best First Book in 1994.

Reviews

[Adrian]

Shortish biography of Scottish writer. Never entirely comfortable in his home country RLS moved around a lot continually writing hoping to find his true voice. Supported through his 20s by his parents he was dogged by a sense of owing and was under continual attack from his poor constitution. He suffered from a number of ailments the worst of which was tuberculosis. He hemorraghed frequently. In the 1880s after his father's death he took off for the South Seas where he found in Samoa a home away from home. Unfortunately he lived only five more years dying at age 43. The author's only failing is an animus towards many of the people whom RLS loved and relied on for support the most- including his associate W. E. Henley, his stepson Lloyd Osbourne and even Fanny, RLSs long suffering wife. This negative attitude is hard to credit.

[J.R.]

There have been many biographies of Robert Louis Stevenson. But, Ian Bell offers insight on aspects of the man and the writer missed or ignored by his contemporaries and those who chose to examine only one area of his life.

[Mark]

Very readable. Provides historical context for each of Stevenson's major works. Fair in its judgement of Stevenson.