IN THE SOUTH SEAS - Softcover

Robert Louis Stevenson

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0701207663 ISBN 13: 9780701207663

Publisher: Hogarth Press, 1987

Synopsis

1987 Hogarth Press trade paperback, British import, Robert Louis Stevenson (Treasure Island). The book describes Stevenson's two year journey from the Marqueses Islands, to Tahiti, then Honolulu ,and finally Somoa. Stevenson uses the great adventures he experienced and his masterfully writing skills to paint a breath taking view of the islands and thier many beauties.

About this title

From the Back Cover

'The first experience can never be repeated. The first love, the first sunrise, the first South Sea island, are memories apart ...'

In the South Seas records Stevenson's travels with his wife Fanny and their family in the Marquesas, the Paumotus and the Gilbert Islands during 1888-9. Originally drafted in journal form while Stevenson travelled, it was then ambitiously rewritten to describe the islands and islanders as well as Stevenson's own personal experiences. These revisions continued when Stevenson settled on the Samoan island where he died in 1894, and In the South Seas was published posthumously in 1896. Its combination of personal anecdote and historical account, of autobiography and anthropology, of Stevenson and South Sea islands, has a particular charm.

Neil Rennie, who provides in this Penguin Classics edition the first critically emended text, writes: 'In the South Seas, for all its imperfections, is a classic of Pacific travel, the work of the best British writer to see the South Seas ... Stevenson had travelled far from Treasure Island.'

About the Author

Robert Louis Stevenson was born in 1850 in Edinburgh, the son of an engineer. He briefly studied engineering, then law, and contributed to university magazines while a student. Despite life-long poor health, he was an enthusiastic traveller, writing about European travels in the late 1870s and marrying in America in 1879. He contributed to various periodicals, writing first essays and later fiction. His first novel was Treasure Island in 1883, intended for his stepson, who collaborated with Stevenson on two later novels. Some of Stevenson's subsequent novels are insubstantial popular romances, but others possess a deepening psychological intensity. He also wrote a handful of plays in collaboration with W.E. Henley. In 1888, he left England for his health, and never returned, eventually settling in Samoa after travelling in the Pacific islands. His time here was one of relatively good health and considerable writing, as well as of deepening concern for the Polynesian islanders under European exploitation, expressed in fictional and factual writing from his final years, some of which was so contrary to contemporary culture that a full text remained unavailable until well after Stevenson's death. R. L. Stevenson died of a brain haemorrhage in 1894.

About this edition

• Publisher: Hogarth Press
• Publication date: 1987
• ISBN 10: 0701207663
• ISBN 13: 9780701207663
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 392