Since his death, aged 44, in 1894, Robert Louis Stevenson has had a “distinctly mixed” literary reputation, said Andrew Motion in The New Statesman .

To many modernists, and especially the Bloomsbury Group, his adventure-filled novels – among them “Treasure Island”, “Kidnapped” and “Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde” – “looked old hat”. Like Kipling, he has sometimes seemed to be “on the wrong side of history”, and has been dismissed as a mere children’s writer. Yet he hasn’t lacked for heavyweight admirers – Jorge Luis Borges, Vladimir Nabokov, Hilary Mantel – and has remained popular with general readers.

In his “sensible, sympathetic and thorough” biography , the American scholar Leo Damrosch chronicles Stevenson’s “fascinating” life and offers “wise” judgements about his wo

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