Scottish Novels Kidnapped: Catriona: The Master of Ballantrae: Weir of Hermiston
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Biographical note
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-94) was a Scottish novelist, poet and essayist who achieved worldwide acclaim for Treasure Island and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Born and educated in Edinburgh, Stevenson began with essays, short stories and travel writing, most notably Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes (1879). He is best remembered for his first novel Treasure Island (1883) and for The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886). The great Scottish novels followed, with Kidnapped (1886), The Master of Ballantrae (1889), and Weir of Hermiston (1893), which was left unfinished at his death. Catriona (1893), was always planned as the immediate sequel to Kidnapped, but had been delayed in the writing. Stevenson spent seven years in the South Seas, settling for the last five on the island of Upolu in Samoa, where he died suddenly from a cerebral stroke at the age of forty-four.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.