Vailima Letters

Being Correspondence Addressed by Robert Louis Stevenson to Sidney Colvin, November 1890-October 1894

Reading time: about 6.5 h
Length: 88,286 words · 180 pages
Structure: 44 chapters · 4 front-matter sections
Language: English
Era: Victorian

A running, unguarded correspondence from the last four years of a writer's life, sent from his house in Samoa to the friend and editor who had shepherded his career from the start — island building projects, local politics, ill health, and the daily labor of the novels he was writing to the very end.

Robert Louis Stevenson wrote these letters to Sidney Colvin between November 1890 and October 1894; Vailima Letters was first published in 1895, the year after Stevenson's death.

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The text is free of copyright. This edition was prepared from an authoritative digitisation, processed by Bibliomancer under its own review protocol; every automated correction is recorded in its transformation log. Rights assessed for CA, EU, GB, US.

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About the author

Robert Louis Stevenson

1850–1894 · Victorian

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) was born in Edinburgh into a family of lighthouse engineers, trained in law, and turned to writing travel essays and stories. Treasure Island (1883), A Child’s Garden of Verses (1885), Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) and Kidnapped (1886) made him famous. In poor health all his life, he travelled in search of a climate he could bear and settled in 1890 in Samoa, where he died at forty-four.

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