The great exhilarator Caroline Moore enjoys a biography of Robert Louis Stevenson which captures his 'peculiar sparkle'

From: The Sunday Telegraph London | Date: January 23, 2005| Author: | Copyright information

"THE GREAT exhilarator" is how one of Robert Louis Stevenson's friends summed him up: certainly, his life must set the pulses of a prospective biographer racing. It is not just his disease-racked but courageously rackety way of living, coughing blood and chain-smoking as he produced febrile masterpieces, or the sheer range of exotic locations - starting from bourgeois Protestant Edinburgh but ending up in Samoa, and marrying en route a pistol-packing frontierswoman who looked like an "Apache squaw". It is also the vivid quality of the primary sources.

Stevenson's letters run to eight volumes: ...

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