Born in 1850, Robert Louis Stevenson grew up in Edinburgh where his father was a well-respected lighthouse engineer. Stevenson almost followed his father’s example, studying engineering at Edinburgh University, but at twenty-one decided to become a writer.

His early works consist of essays and travel writing, his first book, An Inward Voyage (1878), describes a canoe trip to Belgium and France. Despite his success with this style of writing and having been a writer of fiction since his teens, it was not until 1877 that his first work, a short story, was published.

In 1882, Stevenson began to publish longer fiction and Treasure Island was serialised at this time. Kidnapped (1886) followed with critical success but it was The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) which was to bring Stevenson fame on both sides of the Atlantic. Kidnapped, a fast paced adventure tale, is also a subtle examination of Scottish history and character. These issues were to be integral to his writing. Jekyll and Hyde, while exploring the duality of good and evil, was also a criticism of Victorian morality.

Stevenson flouted convention, rejecting the hypocrisies of Calvinist Scotland, preferring a bohemian lifestyle in France where he met his future wife, Fanny Osbourne, an American divorcee, ten year his senior. He spent time in the American west with Fanny before voyaging even further west, into the Pacific.

His travelling also had the purpose of keeping the writer in warmer climates which were more suited to his health. He was eventually to settle with his family in Samoa in the South Seas, though he did not know, when he arrived, that he was to remain there for the rest of his life. His writing continued to show the importance of his native country and his work is often set in Scotland or uses Scottish themes. His short stories and later fiction such as The Master of Ballantrae (1888) show the writer’s continuing interest in the effects of Scotland’s history on its people. The novels often feature two characters who appear as two sides of one character, each striving to achieve dominance; ultimately they destroy one another, unable to co-exist. This split self can be seen to act as a metaphor for Stevenson’s conception of a divided Scotland.

It was in Samoa that Stevenson was to write Catriona (1893), an unfinished sequel to Kidnapped and Weir of Hermiston (1896, also unfinished) which he was writing when he died in 1894 at the height of his literary power.

Stevenson has been acknowledged as one of the most important writers of Scottish fiction. His writing highlighted the social, philosophical and cultural divisions of nineteenth-century Scotland and has been the inspiration for numerous later writers.