Robert Louis Stevenson and the Art of Collaboration

Robert Louis Stevenson, Collaboration, and the Construction of the Late-Victorian Author argues that understanding literary collaboration is essential to understanding Stevenson’s writings. Stevenson often collaborated with family and friends, sometimes acknowledged, and sometimes not. Early collaborations include three plays with his friend W. E. Henley. Later, he and his wife Fanny co-authored a volume of linked stories, More New Arabian Nights , also titled The Dynamiter (1885). Fanny also contributed to other work that did not bear her name, significantly the Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), and he drew on her diaries for his Pacific writings. He collaborated most extensively with his stepson, Lloyd Osbourne, with whom he wrote three novels: The Wrong Box (1889), The Wrecker (1892), and The Ebb-Tide (1894). Stevenson’s collaborations with Osbourne typify the critical problem my project addresses. Like Fanny Stevenson’s, Osbourne’s literary reputation has not been notable. Furthermore, there is evidence that Stevenson’s collaborations with Osbourne became frustrating. The core question this book addresses is this: why would this famous and successful author of Scottish literature practice a creative process that burdened him with inexpert collaborators? The answer to this question can be found in Stevenson’s novels, essays and plays, which dramatize the process of collaboration. Stevenson creates an alternate narrative of what it means to write—one that challenges commonly held assumptions about the celebrity cult of the author in Victorian literature, and notions of authorship more generally.