RLS in Love

RLS in Love makes a powerful argument for recognising Stevenson as a love poet. This unique anthology reveals 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 are organised to reflect the three main stages in Stevenson’s emotional life: his late adolescence and early manhood characterised by a succession of trysts in the woods and dells of the Pentland hills, and encounters with working women in the Old Town brothels; his passionate but doomed relationship with Fanny Sitwell; and finally the troubled, infuriating but often ecstatic emotional journey with his wife.