A sensual Calvinist, a Tory radical, a consumptive celebrant of action, a Passionate Scot who chose to live anywhere but Scotland. Not for nothing was Robert Louis Stevenson the author of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

The greatest of Scottish novelists, Stevenson lived a life as extraordinary and as absorbing as his books. But it was a life tormented by an autocratic father, recurring illness, the prudery of the Victorian reading public and, most of all, the stresses imposed on him by his wife and stepchildren.

This powerful new study is published to mark the centenery of Stevenson's death at the age of forty-four.