St. Ives: Being the Adventures of a French Prisoner in England
1897
St. Ives: Being the Adventures of a French Prisoner in England
1897
Robert Louis Stevenson's unfinished masterpiece follows Anne de Keroual de St. Yves, a French nobleman and soldier captured during the Napoleonic Wars and imprisoned in an Edinburgh castle. Wrenched from battle and thrust into damp Scottish captivity, St. Yves observes his fellow prisoners with a foreigner's wry eye, finding absurdity in the bureaucratic indignities of war and unexpected camaraderie in the dungeon. But it is his forbidden infatuation with Flora, the young Englishwoman who visits the prison, that transforms his confinement into something more dangerous than any battlefield: a question of who he is when everything has been taken from him, even his language, his country, his name. Stevenson, working at the height of his powers, infuses this unfinished gem with the same dark wit that made Jekyll and Hyde unforgettable, mining humor from despair while never losing sight of the human cost beneath. The result is a peculiar romance, a prisoner-of-war tale, and a meditation on identity under duress that feels startlingly modern in its refusal to offer easy resolutions.
