The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. 12
The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. 12
This volume gathers two of Stevenson's most psychologically rich novels, each exploring the fracture and mending of intimate bonds. The Master of Ballantrae stands as one of his darkest achievements: a tale of two brothers divided by the Jacobite rising, their rivalry unfolding across decades and continents. The charismatic Master rides off to join the Pretender while the steadfast Henry remains with their dying father, and from this primal division flows betrayal, haunting, and a strange terminal geometry of revenge. Stevenson writes with gothic intensity about the bonds of blood turned to poison, and the narrator, a weary family secretary who has witnessed the whole tragedy unfold, lends the tale an elegiac, unreliable weight that chills. Prince Otto, by contrast, offers Stevenson's sole full experiment in romantic fiction: a prince and his wife grown cold in the machinery of state discover their way back to each other through palace coups and exile. The prose has a lighter, more ironic touch, but beneath its comedy lies the same Stevensonian interest in how people reveal their true selves under pressure. Together these novels trace the same arc in different keys: love twisted by duty, then reclaimed through crisis.
