RLS in Love: The Love Poetry of Robert Louis Stevenson

R.L.S. in Love makes a powerful argument for recognising Stevenson as a love poet, a restless man constantly struggling with love and lust, invariably attracted to unobtainable or unsuitable partners, including distant relatives, older married women, servants, and prostitutes. The poems reflect the three main stages in Stevenson’s emotional life: his late adolescence and early manhood characterised by a succession of trysts in the Pentland hills, and encounters in the Old Town brothels; his passionate but doomed relationship with Fanny Sitwell; and finally the troubled but often ecstatic emotional journey with his wife.