Volume 8, Number 1 · January 26, 1967
Stevenson for Grown-Ups
By Bernard Bergonzi
From Scotland to Silverado
by Robert Louis Stevenson, edited by James D. Hart
Harvard, 287 pp., $5.95
Robert Louis Stevenson and the Fiction of Adventure
by Robert Kiely
Harvard, 285 pp., $5.50
When Robert Louis Stevenson died in Samoa at the age of forty-four, in 1894, Henry James wrote, 'He lighted up one whole side of the globe, and was in himself a whole province of one's imagination. We are smaller fry and meaner people without him.' The mutual regard of these two writers, which involved genuine literary admiration as well as personal friendship, may be surprising to the modern reader, who thinks of James as the great luminary of the 'serious' novel, while Stevenson is remembered, if at all, simply as a writer of superior children's books. And yet James was by no means alone in his veneration for Stevenson; there were many similar expressions of desolation at the news of his death, and a widespread opinion that a major literary talent had been prematurely extinguished. In the last few years there has been a slow but noticeable growth of interest in the 'minor' writers of the late nineteenth century, and it would be surprising if Stevenson, once so much admired, had not been selected for a fresh assessment. He is fortunate in having found so perceptive a critic as Mr. Kiely to unfold his essential qualities, and to make a case for the mature Stevenson as a serious novelist.
Review, 1801 words
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