Here is the programme for RLS2026 (Un)natural Stevenson, Venice, 11-12 May

“There is another isle in my collection, the memory of which besieg... ƒ In literature as well as in scientific and anthropological studies, islands are often depicted as zoological, botanical and even ethnological conservatories where endemic plants, species, but als...

“There is another isle in my collection, the memory of which besieges me”: The Island as a Creative Archive in R. L. Stevenson’s Works
Julie Gay
doi.org/10.4000/161mk

Just published: "Robert Louis Stevenson’s
“The Sire de Malétroit’s Door” and Its Intertexts" by
BURKHARD NIEDERHOFF (Open Access)

Pencil drawing by P. S. Kroyer (1851-1909), Den Hirschspungske Samling, Copenhagen

Pastille 150 ans du voyage de Robert-Louis Stevenson sur les canaux du Nord

Ecluse

Dans le sillage de Robert-Louis Stevenson : de mars à septembre 2026, un programme de balades littéraires à vélo pour faire revivre une aventure fluviale sur la Sambre et l’Oise vécue il y a 150 ans.
Pour s’informer et s’inscrire : eurovelo3.fr/randonnee-st...
#Stevenson #baladeàvélo #vélofamille

Robert Louis Stevenson by Glenda Norquay review: 'full of sharp details' Glenda Norquay’s new biography of Stevenson deals admirably with unpicking the author’s very self-conscious self-fashioning, writes Stuart Kelly

Robert Louis Stevenson by Glenda Norquay review: 'full of sharp details' @glendanorquay.bsky.social @scotsman.com

8.3K views · 106 reactions | Robert Louis Stevenson was born in 1850 in Edinburgh into a family of famous civil engineers. After a childhood wracked by illness and intermittent schooling he tried the family business before being called to the bar in 1875. But what he really wanted was to pursue literature, and after establishing himself as an essayist he got his big break with ‘Treasure Island’ in 1883. In 1886 he published both ‘The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde’ and ‘Kidnapped’. He travelled constantly in his adult life, across Europe and America, before moving to Samoa where he died suddenly in 1894. In this extract from our Close Readings podcast, Tom Crewe goes through Stevenson’s life. Listen to more on: Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrrlsfb Spotify: https://lrb.me/spotifycrrlsfb | London Review of Books Robert Louis Stevenson was born in 1850 in Edinburgh into a family of famous civil engineers. After a childhood wracked by illness and intermittent schooling he tried the family business before being...

Robert Louis Stevenson in 90 seconds @lrb.co.uk

Strange Case of Stevenson and Unseen Collaborators: “A Chapter on Dreams” as a Textual Double of Jekyll and Hyde

Leeds University reunites damaged statue with 3D-printed head The headless statuette of Robert Louis Stevenson was found in the University of Leeds archive.

Decapitated statuette in Leeds University archives identified as author Robert Louis Stevenson restored with 3D printed head will go on display in an exhibition celebrating 10 years of the Treasures of the Brotherton Gallery.👇
www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Image of writer Robert Louis Stevenson on cover of Critical Lives biography by Glenda Norquay

Very pleased to see this wee book on restless adventurer Robert Louis Stevenson out in the world.
Thanks to Reaktion Books for all their support along the way. reaktionbooks.co.uk/work/robert-...

#RLS @asls.org.uk @iassl.bsky.social

MY DEAREST PEOPLE, —I have had a great piece of news. There has been offered for Treasure Island— how much do you suppose ? I believe it would be an excellent jest to keep the answer till my next letter. For two cents I would do so. Shall I? Anyway, I'll turn the page first. No— well— A hundred pounds, all alive, O! A hundred jingling, tingling, golden, minted quid. Is not this wonderful? Add that I have now finished, in draft, the fifteenth chapter of my novel, and have only five before me, and you will see what cause of gratitude I have. Robert Louis Stevenson to his parents about selling Treasure Island

I love how excited he was about this :)

#RLSletters

Podcast: Andrew O’Hagan, Tom Crewe and Clare Bucknell · Novel Approaches: ‘Kidnapped’ by Robert Louis Stevenson

Novel Approaches: ‘Kidnapped’ by Robert Louis Stevenson
Andrew O’Hagan, Tom Crewe and Clare Bucknell www.lrb.co.uk/podcasts-and...

Bluidy Jack’s Prisoner Bluidy Jack’s Prisoner

Bluidy Jack’s Prisoner
13 Nov, Edinburgh – free

Although often bed-bound with the pulmonary disease he called “Bluidy Jack”, Robert Louis Stevenson continued to write. The RLS Club examines the author’s strange double life, as they celebrate his 175th birthday
cultureedinburgh.com/events/bluid...

Robert Louis Stevenson Day 2025 Edinburgh Celebrates A Great Scottish Writer

Events planned for #RLSday2025 on Nov 13th in Edinburgh rlsday.wordpress.com

Escape Artists Podcast Episode · The TLS Podcast · 23/10/2025 · 50m

Margaret Drabble talks about Leo Damrosch’s biography of RLS and his entourage in this week’s @thetls.bsky.social podcast podcasts.apple.com/fr/podcast/t...

Book Talk: Storyteller by Leo Damrosch Yale Library Book Talks Leo Damrosch, Ernest Bernbaum Research Professor of Literature Emeritus at Harvard University, will speak about his new book "Storyteller: the Life of Robert Louis Stevenson." Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) is famed for Treasure Island, Kidnapped, and Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, but he published many other novels and stories before his death at forty-four. Despite lifelong ill health, he had immense vitality; Mark Twain said his eyes burned with “smoldering rich fire.” Born in Edinburgh to a family of lighthouse engineers, Stevenson set many stories in Scotland but sought travel and adventure in a life as romantic as his novels. “I loved a ship,” he wrote, “as a man loves burgundy or daybreak.” The adventures were shared with his free-spirited American wife, Fanny, with whom he moved to the South Pacific. Samoan friends named Stevenson “Storyteller.” Reading, he said, “should be absorbing and voluptuous; we should gloat over a book, be rapt clean out of ourselves.” His own books have been translated into dozens of languages. Jorge Luis Borges called his stories “one of the forms of happiness,” and other modernist masters as various as Proust, Nabokov, and Calvino have paid tribute to his greatness as a literary artist. In Storyteller, Leo Damrosch brings to life an unforgettable personality, illuminated by many who knew Stevenson well and drawing from thousands of the writer’s letters in his many voices and moods—playful, imaginative, at times tragic. Leo Damrosch is the Ernest Bernbaum Professor of Literature Emeritus at Harvard University. His many books include "Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genius" (National Book Award finalist); "Adventurer: The Life and Times of Giacomo Casanova"; "The Club: Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends Who Shaped an Age"; and "Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World" (National Book Critics Circle Award winner, Pulitzer Prize finalist).

Leo Damrosch, emeritus professor at Harvard University, will speak about his new book "Storyteller: the Life of Robert Louis Stevenson" on Nov. 19th 4:30pm. Check out the event here:

Event date: Wednesday 8 October Time: 13:00-14:00 Location: Seminar room, 2 Hope Park Square, Edinburgh, EH8 9NW An IASH Work-in-Progress seminar, delivered by Dr Shari Sabeti (Sabbatical Fellow, 2025) ‘Ending badly from the beginning’: facing finitude with Robert Louis Stevenson. What does it mean to live - and to write - well, through experiences of illness and in the shadow of death? Is death the end, or the beginning of relationships? This presentation considers these questions through an exploration of the life, work, and legacy of the Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson. It focuses on his last years, as both exile and settler colonial, in Sāmoa, a Pacific island he had travelled to in search of health. Drawing on Barthes’ concepts of the punctum and biographeme, as well as writing on illness (Sontag, Frank), the chapter blends ethnographic fieldwork, literary and photographic analysis, elements of biography and personal reflection. It argues that Stevenson’s relationship with Sāmoa and Samoans continues through to the present day in oral histories, school songs, grave-site rituals, and community narratives that position him within specifically Sāmoan frameworks of care, kinship, and place.

Under the wide and starry sky,
Dig the grave and let me lie…

“Ending badly from the beginning”: facing finitude with Robert Louis Stevenson
8 Oct @edinburgh-uni.bsky.social & online – free

An @iashedinburgh.bsky.social Work-in-Progress seminar from Dr Shari Sabeti
www.iash.ed.ac.uk/event/dr-sha...

Ah yes, but who took Scott to Orkney where he learned about Gow? RLS’s grandfather, Robert Stevenson.

One obvious obstacle to physical authenticity is Silver’s leg: cut “close by the hip” in the text, all the actors to play him are bipedal; therefore, they all had to fold and secure their left legs in what must presumably be a very uncomfortable position, making the role physically challenging (Stevenson [1883] 2012, p. 85). Such an arrangement must also make moving like Stevenson’s Silver very difficult. Fleming accounts for this by using an action double for Beery, most clearly in his murder of Tom, allowing the audience to believe in his physical prowess (Fleming 1934, 55:33–56:27). Newton maneuvers impressively on the crutch but does little to convince the viewer of any physical threat. This fact allows for film adaptations to further soften the Silver character as we will discuss in the next two sections: where Stevenson’s Silver appears to use his disfigurement to disguise his physical abilities, making him dangerous, film adaptations often use it to blunt any real threat. Charlton Heston, for example, is a menacing presence in the 1990 Turner Pictures adaptation, but his age and awkwardness of movement are a clear contrast with Wyeth’s dynamic, nimble Silver. With the possible exception of Tim Curry—who is younger and more agile than his cinematic counterparts—in the playful 1996 film Muppet Treasure Island, the Silver of the screen must rely more on his wits, his charm, and his presence of character, than on any physical threat he poses, in order to manipulate his crew, Jim, or Jim’s friends.

ACTUAL SCIENCE proves that Tim Curry gives the pre-eminent screen portrayal of Long John Silver

From Braemar to Hollywood: The American Appropriation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Pirates
—Richard J. Hill & Laura Eidam, Humanities 2020, 9(1)
www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/9/...

From Illustration to Meme: The Pictorial Representa-
tion of Duality in Editions of Robert Louis Stevenson’s
Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
WOLFGANG G. MÜLLER scholar.google.fr/scholar_url?...

One More Time: Stevenson’s “Across the Plains” and
the Genre of Trans-American Travel
CAROLINE MCCRACKEN-FLESHER in Connotations www.connotations.de/wp-content/u...

Othello in the South Seas: Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Beach of Falesá” as Shakespearean Rewriting
Lucio De Capitani
Published in Connotations Vol. 34 (2025) www.connotations.de/article/othe...

To the Commissioners of Northern Lights Robert Louis Stevenson I send to you, commissioners, A paper that may please ye, sirs (For troth they say it might be worse‍‍ An’ I believe’t) And on your business lay my curse‍‍ Before I leav’t. I thocht I’d serve wi’ you, sirs, yince, But I’ve thocht better of it since; The matter I will nowise mince,‍‍ But tell ye true: I’ll service wi’ some ither prince,‍‍ An’ no wi’ you. I’ve no been very deep, ye’ll think, Cam’ delicately to the brink An’ when the water gart me shrink‍‍ Straucht took the rue, An’ didna stoop my fill to drink—‍‍ I own it true. I kent on cape and isle, a light Burnt fair an’ clearly ilka night; But at the service I took fright,‍‍ As sune’s I saw, An’ being still a neophite‍‍ Gaed straucht awa’. Anither course I now begin, The weeg I’Il cairry for my Sin, The court my voice shall echo in,‍‍ An’—wha can tell?— Some ither day I may be yin‍‍ O’ you mysel’.

I send to you, commissioners,
A paper that may please ye, sirs
(For troth they say it might be worse‍‍
An’ I believe’t)…

—Robert Louis Stevenson, “To the Commissioners of Northern Lights”, which RLS sent along with his design for “a new form of intermittent light”
#InternationalLighthouseWeekend
1/4

www.radiofrance.fr/francecultur...

Robert Cain in KIDNAPPED (1917), the earliest known feature-length adaptation of the Robert Louis Stevenson novel. I crowdfunded a DVD release with the film and all the original shorts that accompanied it (a fairy tale, a gladiator comedy, two actualities) back in 2018

Courting the Bourgeois: Stevenson, Baudelaire, and Writing as a Profession
Katherine Ashley
Connotations, Vol. 34, 153-169. www.connotations.de/article/kath...

My article on Stevenson and Scott, “'Scott’s Voyage in the Lighthouse Yacht' and Intertextual Transmission" has been published in Connotations www.connotations.de/article/lesl...

CFP_UnNatural_Stevenson_Venice_2026 Call for papers: (Un)natural Stevenson Wild transgressions across literature, ecology, science and gender Ca’ Foscari University of Venice 11-12 May 2026 Aula Baratto Organizers: Lucio De Capitani...

CFP: (Un)natural Stevenson
Wild transgressions across literature, ecology, science and gender, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Aula Baratto, 11-12 May 2026 Organizers: Lucio De Capitani & Alessandro Cabiati docs.google.com/document/d/1...

But the semicolon is the triggering device, revealing Stevenson's habit of stringing together details in a loosely punctuated sequence. Through the lucidity of his prose Stevenson discloses a fundamental irony: that things in the world are not clear and lucid; that the more one aspires to express their coherence, and is successful at it, the more one recognizes the futility of the pursuit; that language itself, and the way in which we organize and build our sentences, provide an illusion at odds with reality. The semicolon, with its pause-virtually a full stop, yet not the end of a sentence-fits Stevenson's scheme beautifully: it is neither a terminal mark, like a period, nor an intermediate device, like a comma. This ambiguity is apparent even in simple compound sentences, where Stevenson almost invariably uses the semicolon. He does not separate the clauses with periods, nor does he use commas. It is as if he were not sure whether to make his statements independent or to connect them. There is an uncertainty built into his style that is encouraged or assisted by his use of the semicolon.

“Stevenson discloses a fundamental irony: that things in the world are not clear & lucid… There is an uncertainty built into his style that is encouraged or assisted by his use of the semicolon”

—Barry Menikoff’s Robert Louis Stevenson & “The Beach of Falesá”
www.barrymenikoff.net/robert_louis...

I got mugged!

My new variant cover for THRAWN JANET…now a mug!
Cheerio!

shop.whaleden.com/products/thr...