Robert Louis Stevenson:: A Biography - Hardcover

In time for the centenary of Stevenson's death, this weighty biography ballasts the romantic version of his life, from his wild youth in Edinburgh to his exile in Samoa, with an integrated appreciation of Scotland's best writer. Historian and biographer McLynn (Hearts of Darkness: The European Exploration of Africa, 1993, etc.) is a good match for Stevenson and a doughty partisan for his literary worth, which suffered posthumously from both the hagiography encouraged by his wife, Fanny, and from subsequent Bloomsbury debunking. Now, with later champions like Borges and Nabokov and recently renewed biographical interest, Stevenson can no longer be dismissed as a children's author with adult crossover appeal or a dilettante with a Byronic talent for living more interestingly than he wrote. McLynn balances a historian's thorough research with well-chosen excerpts from Stevenson's letters, essays, and verse, whose grace makes an unflattering contrast with the biography's tone-deaf prose. McLynn intimately depicts Stevenson's sickly childhood in Edinburgh (particularly the Calvinist nurse who had an acknowledged effect on his imagination), bohemian university days, early literary career, and later travels. The writer's life took an unlooked-for turn when he met Fanny Osbourne, a married American with a frontier temperament, misplaced artistic aspirations, and neurotic possessiveness-or at least that was the opinion of his friends, particularly editor and poet W.E. Henley, who famously fell out with Stevenson after he set out for Samoa to improve his health. In the Pacific Stevenson outdid Melville, at least with the Samoans, who accorded him heroic status. The book is marred toward the end by McLynn's undisguised antipathy for Fanny and her clan, whose demands are blamed for Stevenson's stroke and the lower quality of his South Seas writings. (For The Collected Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, see p. 1347.) Nonetheless, Stevenson's charm is visible in every letter and essay quoted in this noteworthy biography. (16 pages b&w photos) -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Nineteen ninety-four is the centennial of Robert Louis Stevenson's death, a milestone already excellently commemorated by journalist Ian Bell's exciting narrative biography, Dreams of Exile. McLynn's more massive life is rife with the scholarly apparatus, literary analysis, and academic thoroughness and tone that Bell eschewed in order to tell a story and limn character. In short, McLynn's is a much more conventional literary biography, and those devoted to that genre will find it exemplary. In particular, those who have read many of Stevenson's works will enjoy its assessments of them and its accounts of their writing. Yet, compared to Bell's book, McLynn's is a dry read meant, it seems, primarily for avid, studious Stevensonians. McLynn offers a biographical accounting--literally, for all the relevant documents are scrupulously cited--but Bell gave us a work of literature in its own right. McLynn's book is for big collections of literary biographies; Bell's is for those and for the popular library. (Thoroughgoing literary collections should be cognizant of the ongoing edition of The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, the two most recent volumes of which are the third [Yale, $45, 0-300-06187-0] and the fourth [Yale, $45, 0-300-06188-9]; four more volumes will complete the set.) Ray Olson