Robert Louis Stevenson born 1850-1894

About:

Robert Louis Stevenson was born in Edinburgh into a prestigious family of lighthouse designers and engineers on his father’s side and moral philosophers on his mother’s. His mother’s legacy to the young Stevenson was rather more damaging however in that he inherited her weak lungs which dominated his short life until his death forty-four years later.

Stevenson did not begin writing seriously until he was twenty-five after he had acquired a legal qualification, at his family’s insistence. Maybe through the stress of completing a legal degree under duress, his health was however seriously failing and Stevenson was sent abroad to seek warmer climates. He travelled to France where he felt an immediate affinity with the more easy going Southern culture changing his name from Lewis to Louis following the French spelling. He fell in love in 1880 with Fanny Vandergrift Osbourne an American fleeing an unhappy marriage, and having followed her to America, nearly killed himself traversing the continent to find her in San Francisco.

The rest of his life was spent chasing a climate that would help him in his fight against tuberculosis. He returned often to France and spent three contented years on board a chartered yacht, indulging his love for all things adventurous and spending long stays in Hawaii, Tahiti and the Samoan Islands. In 1890 he settled in Opolu, one of the Samoan Islands and lived there for his last four years, becoming intimately involved in the politics of the islands and effecting fairly instrumental changes in the running of the colony. In December 1894 in the middle of what is considered by many to be his best work, The Wier of Hermiston, Stevenson died of a brain haemorrhage. His body was carried several miles by the islanders to a place of prominence on a cliff top where he was buried with the epitaph, written by himself some years earlier,

Under the wide and starry sky,
Dig the grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.
This be the verse you grave for me:
Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from the sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.