The Cevennes Journal: Notes on a Journey through the French Highlands

by Robert Louis Stevenson, Gordon Golding (Editor), Jacques Blondel (Contributor)

'For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move.' - RLS

In September 1878, Robert Louis Stevenson travelled by donkey through the Cevennes region of France. For personal memory — and, as it happens, for literary posterity — the young Stevenson recorded copious notes on his journey as he travelled. Some of these witty and incisive impressions were subsequently published in Travels with a Donkey. The remainder, however, didn't find its way into print until the first publication of The Cevennes Journal in 1978, one hundred years later. This travelogue, which also includes several of Stevenson's previously unpublished sketches of the region, provides both a unique socio-historical document and an important piece of literature.

Genres: Travel, Nonfiction

159 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1978

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.