Robert Louis Stevenson

St. Ives Robert Louis Stevenson

The irreverent tale revolves around the exploits of Captain Jacques St. Ives who is captured by the British and thrown in jail. While there, he meets the droll Miss Gilchrist and her lovely niece, Flora, who takes an interest in the prisoner. For Jacques and Flora, it's love at first sight - although Major Chevening had his eye on her first. Not long afterward, Jacques escapes and makes an enemy out of his long lost brother Alain, who's been living in Scotland and looking to take over the family fortune upon the death of their grandfather. Jacques thought Alain had been killed with their parents during the French Revolution. The escaped prisoner represents a threat to his brother and to the major, and now the plot thickens... St. Ives is one of Stevenson's last romances, left unfinished at his death, yet still showing the same key qualities as his earlier works. It was completed in 1898 by Arthur Quiller-Couch. Robert Louis Stevenson was a Scottish novelist, poet, and travel writer, and a leading representative of Neo-romanticism in English literature. Stevenson was a celebrity in his own time, but with the rise of modern literature after World War I, he was seen for much of the 20th century as a writer of the second class, relegated to children's literature and horror genres. Condemned by authors such as Virginia and Leonard Woolf, he was gradually excluded from the canon of literature taught in schools. His exclusion reached a height when in the 1973 2,000-page Oxford Anthology of English Literature Stevenson was entirely unmentioned.