The weedy wanderer

The biographers, like eager heirs round a deathbed, were amassing by Robert Louis Stevenson’s side while he was still breathing. The story, they could tell, was going to be just too good. The age loved a youthful demise, and anyone could see that Stevenson was not going to make old bones. They were quite right, and the myth of Stevenson has gone on inspiring countless biographers ever since. It’s very surprising that Claire Harman’s publishers claim that ‘no biography has yet done justice’ to Stevenson. This ground has been gone over so many times, and it is a bold biographer who thinks that a small change in circumstances — in this case, the recent publication of Stevenson’s collected letters — gives her a decisive advantage over her many predecessors.

All the same, it is a terrific story. It is the paradox of Stevenson that’s so fascinating: the man who wrote such dashing adventure stories was, himself, a frail invalid and weedy aesthete.