The Scottish Novels
Kidnapped: Catriona: The Master of Ballantrae: Weir of Hermiston
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Kidnapped - Catriona - The Master of Ballantrae - Weir of Hermiston
These four great novels take us deep into Robert Louis Stevenson's imaginative and bitter-sweet relationship with his native country.
Kidnapped, and its sequel Catriona, are renowned the world over as supreme stories of adventure and romance. On another level they also explore the subtle divisions of Scottish history and character in the eighteenth century, and (some would say) the present day.
The Master of Ballantrae takes a darker and more disturbing turn, with its tale of rival brothers caught in a webof hatred, obsession, love and betrayal which draws them to their end in the frozen wastes of North America.
Stevenson's fascination with the divided nature of the human self (most obviously demonstrated in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde) appears again in the Weir of Hermiston with its terrible confrontation between a father and his son.
With an unsurpassed combination of physical adventure and psychological insight, The Scottish Novels have moved and thrilled readers and writers from Stevenson's contemporaries to the present day.
Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Stevenson was born in Edinburgh in 1850, the only son of an engineer, Thomas Stevenson. Despite a lifetime of poor health, Stevenson was a keen traveller, and his first book An Inland Voyage (1878) recounted a canoe tour of France and Belgium. In 1880, he married an American divorcee, Fanny Osbourne, and there followed Stevenson's most productive period, in which he wrote, amongst other books, Treasure Island (1883), The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and Kidnapped (both 1886). In 1888, Stevenson left Britain in search of a more salubrious climate, settling in Samoa, where he died in 1894.
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