Jolly’s book is, as the subtitle implies, a work of literary criticism, not a biography. Readers unfamiliar with the facts of Stevenson’s life (1850–94) will need to look elsewhere – not that Jolly ignores biographical information: on the contrary, it forms a large part of the historical context for her study. She has much to say about Stevenson’s complicated (though mutually respectful) relationship with his father, and his admiration, even envy, of the latter’s profession of civil engineer. The first chapter covers the beginnings of Stevenson’s literary career, his progress from engineering trainee to law student to professional writer. It also traces, through his essays, letters and fiction, the evolution of his ideas of literature, from a callow ‘art for art’s sake’ philosophy to a more instrumental view. He eventually conceived the hope that he could use his literary skill and fame to help right the wrongs he had witnessed in Samoa. However, he came to see the futility of this hope: ‘I cannot help feeling that a man who makes his bread by writing fiction labours under the disadvantage of suspicion when he touches on matters of fact’, he wrote to British parliamentarian J.F. Hogan.

Jolly draws a fascinating parallel between Stevenson’s determination to ‘speak truth to power’ by writing letters to the Times, which ensured his unpopularity with those who wielded authority in Samoa and kept him under continual threat of deportation, and David Balfour’s valiant efforts in Catriona to testify at the trial of James Stewart in the face of implacable opposition from the British administration (also an imperial power) in the Scotland of 1751. Neither Stevenson nor Balfour succeeded in their objectives: ‘These conscientious attempts to be “vocal” foundered, in fiction and in fact, against the rock of political expediency.’

Jolly also shows how Stevenson’s legal knowledge feeds into his work. Novels such as Catriona, and his South Pacific writings, demonstrate not just his knowledge of the workings of British law, but a profound understanding of the philosophy of law. In Catriona, the conflict between political necessity and the rights of the individual is not only fundamental to the plot but is also explicitly debated by Balfour and the Lord Advocate, Prestongrange. In his travels in the Pacific, Stevenson discovered another kind of legal conflict, between the European legal system based on Roman law and the system of tapu still in effect in many island societies. Jolly writes: ‘Stevenson paid attention to the way superstition functioned to support social order. This led him … to dispute the idea that the supposedly more highly evolved legal institutions are the more effective or the more intellectually advanced.’

It also led Stevenson to understand the destructive power of outsiders interfering with these social systems. In 1889 he wrote to the Reverend S.E. Bishop in Honolulu:

That the old religion was a pretty bad one I do not think any one would dare to controvert; but if there is one thing stranger than another, it is the way in which our race gets along with (and sucks profit from) the worst religions. When all ancient sanctions are broken, no matter how imperfect they were, we must expect a debacle.

This seems to show Stevenson as a modern liberal, pluralist in his inclinations, and Jolly is keen to promote that view. She perhaps underplays his propensity to describe the islanders as children, and his admiration of characters such as Captain Brandeis, ‘an able, over-hasty white, with eyes and ideas’. In A Footnote to History: Eight years of trouble in Samoa (1892), Stevenson describes how, using the Samoan chief Tamasese as a puppet king, the German Brandeis

had come to do an alien’s work, highly needful for Samoa, but essentially unpopular with Samoans. The law to be enforced, causes of dispute between white and brown to be eliminated, taxes to be raised, a central power created, the country opened up, the native race taught industry; all these were detestable to the natives, and to all of these he must set his hand. The more I learn of his brief term of rule, the more I learn to admire him, and to wish we had his like.

Jolly, however, argues that Stevenson’s attitude to Samoa must be distinguished from his attitude to other Pacific societies. In Samoa, after a hundred years of contact with Europeans, the débâcle had already occurred. There was no going back.

In his essay ‘Some Aspects of Robert Burns’, Stevenson writes, ‘To take a man’s work piecemeal, except with the design of elegant extracts, is the way to avoid, and not to perform, the critic’s duty’. Jolly’s intention is, similarly, to reinstate Stevenson’s lesser-known works alongside the bestsellers which made him a household name, both in his own time and ours, while also pointing out that some of those popular classics contain an unusual complexity of thought for gripping, plot-driven adventure stories. Nevertheless, it must be said, reading A Footnote to History in 2009, one can, to some extent, sympathise with its contemporary English readers. Stevenson’s vivid turn of phrase has not deserted him – witness the image of ‘the island races, comparable to a shopful of crockery launched upon the stream of time, now fall to make their desperate voyage among pots of brass and adamant’ – but his way of starting in media res and assuming a certain amount of prior knowledge, which works beautifully in the novels, can be confusing and alienating in polemical non-fiction. However, Jolly’s study is a subtle and satisfying work of literary scholarship, and her thorough research into intellectual history and perceptive close readings of Stevenson’s works illuminate some little understood aspects of this extraordinarily varied and intellectually challenging writer.