
Robert Louis Stevenson at Skerryvore
By Sian Mackay
Why did Robert Louis Stevenson – the ‘doomed and dazzling’ Scottish writer – settle in a Bournemouth villa called ‘Skerryvore’? And what went on behind the façade to induce him to set aside Kidnapped, the boys’ adventure he was working on, and create, before the year was out, his chilling psychological thriller Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde?
It is 1885, a tempestuous – and pivotal – year in Stevenson’s writing life. He names the villa Skerryvore after the lighthouse put up by his family’s engineering firm off the west coast of Scotland. His landlocked Skerryvore is perched at the edge of a chalky ravine, or chine, not far from the English Channel. There, he struggles to reconcile illness, entrapment, marital discord and lack of funds with his drive to write.
In this literary biography, Sian Mackay explores how such macabre surroundings influenced one of the most infamous gothic novels of all time in a deftly drawn portrait of this most celebrated writer.