A Romance
INSCRIBED BY ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON TO HIS MOTHER
Prince Otto A Romance
Chatto & Windus, 1885.
First edition. Original blue-green cloth with red floral motif and gilt titles to spine. Author's presentation copy to his mother, inscribed, "The author to his mother, Skerryvore, Bournemouth." A very good copy indeed, minor wear to the extremities and fragile hinges. Housed in a custom made quarter morocco box.
A fine association copy. The only child of Thomas and Margaret Stevenson, Robert Louis was very sickly as a child and was doted upon by his mother. As he grew up he sustained a strained relationship with his authoritarian and distant father resulting in several fallings out. All this contributed to the unusually close relationship between Stevenson and his mother, who was deeply proud of her son's achievements. Stevenson's presentation copies to her are a testament to the most personal and fundamental of influences.
Prince Otto was Stevenson's second published novel, an 'action romance' set in the imaginary Germanic state of Grünewald, and was largely written between April and December 1883. Stevenson notes, "[it] was written at Hyères; it took me about five months" and he called it, "my hardest effort". One of the chapters was rewritten eight times by Stevenson and once by his wife. Nonetheless, on its publication in 1885, it received some very positive reviews. Andrew Lang in the Pall Mall Gazette wrote somewhat floridly that: "it is a book to be drunk in one long breath, like a draught of sunny Moselle from a tapering, iridescent Venetian goblet".
Stevenson's novels are seldom seen in commerce.
Stock ID: 17113
£15,000.00
