Robert Louis Stevenson in the Pacific

Robert Louis Stevenson in the Pacific by Roslyn Jolly explores a transformative period in Stevenson's life from 1887 to 1894, beginning with his departure from Europe following a vocational crisis prompted by his father's death. Impatient with his established identity as a writer, Stevenson sought to explore different ways of writing, which living in the Pacific helped stimulate through a range of latent intellectual and political interests.

Roslyn Jolly examines how Stevenson's Pacific travel-writing and political texts aided his self-transformation. Driven by a desire to understand unfamiliar Polynesian and Micronesian cultures and engage in Samoan politics, Stevenson utilised his legal education, pursued his interest in historiography, and experimented with anthropology and journalism. As Stevenson's geographical and cultural horizons expanded, so did his professional sphere, stretching the category of authorship within which his successes as a novelist had previously confined him.

Despite his growing ambitions, Stevenson's experiments with new styles and genres, alongside his Pacific subject matter, met resistance from his readers. Jolly's analysis of contemporary responses to Stevenson's writing, derived from an extensive collection of reviews, many of which are not readily available, offers fascinating insights into the interests, obsessions, and resistances of Victorian readers.

As Stevenson attempted to escape the vocational confines of his past, his readers clung to outdated images of Stevenson the author, expressing distrust of the new personas he presented. Robert Louis Stevenson in the Pacific provides a compelling examination of this critical period in Stevenson's career.