The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson for Boys and Girls

Jacqueline Overton's biography of the Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson is detailed and factual, yet appropriate for the younger generation. This reprint contains photographs appended to the original edition.


A superb and fluent account, Jacqueline Overton begins each of her chapters with a short yet poignant verse, setting the stage for her narrative. We learn of Stevenson's upbringing and young adulthood in Scotland, the hardships he endured while attending his schooling, and the setbacks with his health that would prove a challenge throughout his entire life.


We learn how Stevenson spent much of his adulthood travelling, either to warmer places for recovery of health or with a view to settling longer term. His writing is shown to be intermittent; Stevenson would alternately not work at all for months at a time, then produce flurries of writing, much of which was quickly acclaimed upon publication.


Robert Louis Stevenson is most famous for a series of novels, most famously the Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, which depicts a doctor with two vastly different personalities. Overton deftly quotes the author's letters, and we are given a sense of Stevenson as a person - a man whose sensitive soul determined to make life an adventure worthy of the telling in biographies such as this.