Throughout his life, Robert Louis Balfour
Stevenson was tormented by poor health. Yet despite frequent
physical collapses–mainly due to constant respiratory illness–he
was an indefatigable writer of novels, poems, essays, letters,
travel books, and children’s books. He was born on November 13,
1850, in Edinburgh, of a prosperous family of lighthouse engineers.
Though he was expected to enter the family profession, he studied
instead for the Scottish bar. By the time he was called to the bar,
however, he had already begun writing seriously, and he never
actually practiced law. In 1880, against his family’s wishes, he
married an American divorcée, Fanny Vandegrift Osbourne, who was
ten years his senior; but the family was soon reconciled to the
match, and the marriage proved a happy one.
All his life Stevenson traveled–often in a desperate quest for
health. He and Fanny, having married in California and spent their
honeymoon by an abandoned silver mine, traveled back to Scotland,
then to Switzerland, to the South of France, to the American
Adirondacks, and finally to the south of France, to the South Seas.
As a novelist he was intrigued with the genius of place: Treasure
Island (1883) began as a map to amuse a boy. Indeed, all his works
reveal a profound sense of landscape and atmosphere: Kidnapped
(1886); The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886); The
Master of Ballantrae (1889).
In 1889 Stevenson’s deteriorating health exiled him to the
tropics, and he settled in Samoa, where he was given patriarchal
status by the natives. His health improved, yet he remained
homesick for Scotland, and it was to the “cold old huddle of grey
hills” of the Lowlands that he returned in his last, unfinished
masterpiece, Weir of Hermiston (1896).
Stevenson dies suddenly on December 3, 1894, not of the
long-feared tuberculosis, but of a cerebral hemorrhage. The kindly
author of Jekyll and Hyde went down to the cellar to fetch a bottle
of his favorite burgundy, uncorked it in the kitchen, abruptly
cried out to his wife, “What’s the matter with me, what is this
strangeness, has my face changed?”–and fell to the floor. The
brilliant storyteller and master of transformations had been struck
down at forty-four, at the height of his creative powers.
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