Weir of Hermiston: An Unfinished Romance
1896
The last novel Robert Louis Stevenson ever wrote, left forever incomplete at his death. This is the work that haunted his final years, so raw with personal truth that he called it "the best thing I have written." It draws directly from Stevenson's own fractured relationship with his formidable father, the stern Lord Justice-Clerk of Edinburgh. Adam Weir is a man of iron principle and zero tenderness, a judge whose rigid devotion to law has calcified into something like cruelty. His son Archie stands in his shadow, caught between duty and conscience, watching his father's courtroom judgments shatter lives. Jean, Archie's mother, watches helplessly as her meekness fails to protect anyone from the cold patriarch. The novel pulses with the anguish of a son trying to understand a father who cannot love, while wrestling with questions about justice, compassion, and whether identity is something we choose or something we're assigned. Stevenson died before finishing it, leaving behind a wound that never heals.
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“God knows; I am careless; this is my true hour of death, and what is to follow concerns someone other than myself.””
— Robert Louis Stevenson
“Many a man would have even blazoned such irregularities as I was guilty of; but from the high views that I had set before me, I regarded and hid them with an almost morbid sense of shame. It was thus rather the exacting nature of my aspirations than any particular degradation in my faults, that made me what I was and, with even a deeper trench than in the majority of men, severed in me those provinces of good and ill which divide and compound man’s dual nature. In this case, I was driven to reflect deeply and inveterately on that hard law of life, which lies at the root of religion and is one of the most plentiful springs of distress.””
— Robert Louis Stevenson
“All things therefore seemed to point to this; that I was slowly losing hold of my original and better self, and becoming slowly incorporated with my second and worse.Between these two, I now felt I had to choose. My two natures had memory in common, but all other faculties were most unequally shared between them. Jekyll (who was composite) now with the most sensitive apprehensions, now with a greedy gusto, projected and shared in the pleasures and adventures of Hyde; but Hyde was indifferent to Jekyll, or but remembered him as the mountain bandit remembers the cavern in which he conceals himself from pursuit. Jekyll had more than a father's interest; Hyde had more than a son's indifference.””
— Robert Louis Stevenson
“Ses amis étaient ceux de son propre sang ou ceux qu’il avait connus le plus longtemps ; ses affections, comme le lierre, étaient le fruit du temps, elles n’impliquaient pas d’aptitude dans l’objet.””
— Robert Louis Stevenson
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<a href="https://lex-books.com/book/weir-of-hermiston-an-unfinished-romance-233f4e57-1e86-4b72-9029-3d5efbd3865b"><img src="https://lex-books.com/badges/read-on-lex.svg" alt="Read Weir of Hermiston: An Unfinished Romance by Robert Louis Stevenson free on Lex" width="160" height="40"></a>[](https://lex-books.com/book/weir-of-hermiston-an-unfinished-romance-233f4e57-1e86-4b72-9029-3d5efbd3865b)[url=https://lex-books.com/book/weir-of-hermiston-an-unfinished-romance-233f4e57-1e86-4b72-9029-3d5efbd3865b][img]https://lex-books.com/badges/read-on-lex.svg[/img][/url]Read Weir of Hermiston: An Unfinished Romance by Robert Louis Stevenson free on Lex: https://lex-books.com/book/weir-of-hermiston-an-unfinished-romance-233f4e57-1e86-4b72-9029-3d5efbd3865bCite this book
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Stevenson, Robert Louis. Weir of Hermiston: An Unfinished Romance. Lex, lex-books.com/book/weir-of-hermiston-an-unfinished-romance-233f4e57-1e86-4b72-9029-3d5efbd3865b.Stevenson, R. L. (1896). Weir of Hermiston: An Unfinished Romance. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/weir-of-hermiston-an-unfinished-romance-233f4e57-1e86-4b72-9029-3d5efbd3865bStevenson, Robert Louis. Weir of Hermiston: An Unfinished Romance. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/weir-of-hermiston-an-unfinished-romance-233f4e57-1e86-4b72-9029-3d5efbd3865b.
