The Master of Ballantrae

Abstract

The idea for a new novel, The Master of Ballantrae, came to Stevenson in December 1887 while pacing the verandah of the house where he was staying near Saranac Lake in the Adirondack mountains. He had been re-reading Marryat’s The Phantom Ship and was ‘moved with the spirit of emulation’. ‘Come,’ he said to himself, ‘let us make a tale, a story of many years and countries, of the sea and the land, savagery and civilisation.’35 He embarked on the project with characteristic enthusiasm, confiding to Sidney Colvin that he had ‘fallen head over heels into a new tale. … It is to me a most seizing tale: there are some fantastic elements; the most is a dead genuine human problem — human tragedy, I should say rather.’36 He completed the first part of the book at Saranac, abandoning it to work on The Wrong Box, then resumed work on it in the autumn of 1888 while staying at Tahiti. The novel was not completed until May 1889, the final chapters causing him particular difficulty. It was published in book form in September 1889, having first been serialised in twelve monthly instalments in Scribner’s Magazine.KeywordsAdirondack MountainOuter SensibilityHuman TragedyFrosted GroundAdventure StoryThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.