Vailima Letters

by Robert Louis Stevenson

Robert Louis Stevenson, in full Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson, (born November 13, 1850, Edinburgh, Scotland--died December 3, 1894, Vailima, Samoa), Scottish essayist, poet, and author of fiction and travel books, best known for his novels Treasure Island (1881), Kidnapped (1886), Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), and The Master of Ballantrae (1889).
Stevenson was the only son of Thomas Stevenson, a prosperous civil engineer, and his wife, Margaret Isabella Balfour. His poor health made regular schooling difficult, but he attended Edinburgh Academy and other schools before, at age 17, entering Edinburgh University, where he was expected to prepare himself for the family profession of lighthouse engineering. But Stevenson had no desire to be an engineer, and he eventually agreed with his father, as a compromise, to prepare instead for the Scottish bar.
He had shown a desire to write early in life, and once in his teens he had deliberately set out to learn the writer's craft by imitating a great variety of models in prose and verse. His youthful enthusiasm for the Covenanters (i.e., those Scotsmen who had banded together to defend their version of Presbyterianism in the 17th century) led to his writing The Pentland Rising, his first printed work. During his years at the university he rebelled against his parents' religion and set himself up as a liberal bohemian who abhorred the alleged cruelties and hypocrisies of bourgeois respectability.
In 1873, in the midst of painful differences with his father, he visited a married cousin in Suffolk, England, where he met Sidney Colvin, the English scholar, who became a lifelong friend, and Fanny Sitwell (who later married Colvin). Sitwell, an older woman of charm and talent, drew the young man out and won his confidence. Soon Stevenson was deeply in love, and on his return to Edinburgh he wrote her a series of letters in which he played the part first of lover, then of worshipper, then of son. One of the several names by which Stevenson addressed her in these letters was "Claire," a fact that many years after his death was to give rise to the erroneous notion that Stevenson had had an affair with a humbly born Edinburgh girl of that name. Eventually the passion turned into a lasting friendship.
Later in 1873 Stevenson suffered severe respiratory illness and was sent to the French Riviera, where Colvin later joined him. He returned home the following spring. In July 1875 he was called to the Scottish bar, but he never practiced. Stevenson was frequently abroad, most often in France. Two of his journeys produced An Inland Voyage (1878) and Travels with a Donkey in the C�vennes (1879). His career as a writer developed slowly. His essay "Roads" appeared in the Portfolio in 1873, and in 1874 "Ordered South" appeared in Macmillan's Magazine, a review of Lord Lytton's Fables in Song appeared in the Fortnightly, and his first contribution (on Victor Hugo) appeared in The Cornhill Magazine, then edited by Leslie Stephen, a critic and biographer. It was these early essays, carefully wrought, quizzically meditative in tone, and unusual in sensibility, that first drew attention to Stevenson as a writer.

Genres: Nonfiction, Biography, History

147 pages, ebook

First published January 1, 1895

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

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

Vailima Letters; Being Correspondence Addressed by Robert Louis Stevenson to Sidney Colvin, November, 1890-October 1894 by Robert Louis Stevenson document the last four years of their author's life. Vailima ("Five Rivers") is the name of RLS's estate in Samoa, not far from Apia.

As his health declined, Stevenson did not let up on his writing activity, composing such novels as Catriona, The Ebb Tide, Weir of Hermiston (unfinished), and St. Ives, as well as the collection of stories titled Island Night's Entertainment.

At the same time as he suffered multiple attacks of fever, hemorrhages, and influenza, he got actively involved in the politics of the archipelago. During his time in Samoa, there was a low-level civil war between two chiefs. Despite the risk of being deported, Stevenson supported the losing side, led by one Mataafa.

At times, the letters dwell on the political mess, problems with manuscripts, social obligations with the European and native residents. Other times, they rise to the level of pure poetry. On August 23, 1893, he writes:

You will see that I am not in a good humour; and I am not. It is not because of your letter, but because of the complicated miseries that surround me and that I choose to say nothing of. Life is not all Beer and Skittles. The inherent tragedy of things works itself out from white to black and blacker, and the poor things of a day look ruefully on. Does it shake my cast-iron faith? I cannot say it does. I believe in an ultimate decency of things; ay, and if I woke in hell, should still believe it! But it is hard walking, and I can see my own share in the missteps, and can bow my head to the result, like an old, stern, unhappy devil of a Norseman, as my ultimate character is. . . .

[Eckhard · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read these letters with great zest when I was a boy, and I'd have to say they've left an indelible mark on me even now, 35 years later. They reveal a side to Stevenson that his novels do not and perhaps are the best insight into this somewhat enigmatic author I have ever run across.