The Master of Ballantrae

Robert Louis Stevenson

Jul 2010 · Canongate Books

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The Master of Ballantrae is Stevenson’s darkest book, the strange tale of two Durie brothers whose differences symbolize the conflicting calls of romance and reason in 18th-century Scotland. Stevenson called this novel 'a winter's tale', as if he were revisiting the brighter worlds of Kidnapped and Treasure Island in a bleaker light, as if the old romances could only lead us now to a wilderness of disorder, emptiness, coldness and night. The story's conclusion bears this out: the two brothers are brought to a bleak and savage end, together and far from home, in the trackless wastes of North America. The Master of Ballantrae reviews and revises the world of the earlier novels (including Jekyll and Hyde) to make one of Stevenson's most challenging and thought-provoking books.

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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.