[In the following review, Mann and Mann compare an earlier version of “Markheim” to a more recent version of the story reprinted in a collection of Stevenson stories edited by Barry Menikoff.]

Because Robert Louis Stevenson is an acclaimed popular writer, many literate people know something about his life: his courageous fight against lung disease, his marriage to an independent-minded American woman, and his wanderlust, in search of a place that would make it easier for him to cope with his illness. Characters, phrases, and ideas from his best works, Treasure Island, A Child's Garden of Verses, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, have virtually been adopted in many cultures. This year marks the centennial of his death, and festivals are planned in a number of locations where he lived and worked in his peripatetic career: Edinburgh, Scotland; Monterey, California; and Samoa in the South Seas.

Despite Stevenson's wide influence, the academy has not paid much attention to his work, preferring instead the canon of his great friend Henry James as a fit subject. And public acclaim for his poetry and novels, rarely out of print since their first publication in the 1880s, has not been shared by his accomplishments in the genre of the short story. It is important, in consequence, that we now have a well-edited volume of Stevenson's principal stories by a scholar who has written on Stevenson for many years and edited his work. Barry Menikoff has gathered Stevenson's shorter narratives together here and has published two stories directly from holograph manuscripts for the first time: “Markheim” (held at Houghton Library, Harvard) and “The Isle of Voices” (Rosenbach Museum and Library).

In his preface Menikoff makes it clear that whatever the popular accolades and scholarly neglect, Stevenson is a writer's writer, earning praise from his contemporaries, including George Meredith, Henry James, and, we might add, Arthur Conan Doyle; and from writers (including Edith Wharton and John Buchan) who represented the next generation. Even modernists and post-modernists—Sean O'Faolain, John Steinbeck, Graham Greene, Jorge Luis Borges, and V. S. Pritchett—testify to his continuing influence. Menikoff's gracefully written introductory essay, “Fable, Fiction, and Modernism,” provides the literary context for Stevenson's tales, written between 1877 and 1893. He shows Stevenson's development as a writer of short fiction in relation both to the French contes by Théophile Gautier and Prosper Mérimée and to American short stories by Edgar Allen Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne. In the French tales, Stevenson was drawn to the emphasis on form and on precise language, whereas the American stories turned him toward moral issues. These tales are not merely “easy entertainments,” Menikoff argues, because the lucidity of Stevenson's style can in fact mask his complexity of meaning. Moral questions—often unresolved—run through the tales, a complex frame for Stevenson's technical mastery.

Menikoff goes on to suggest that Stevenson pursues in most of his stories a theme of “chance, or the capriciousness of life” (p. 18); still, “moral issues, which are the heart of every Stevenson story, are always confronted in individual cases” (p. 11). The narrators or principal characters of the tales are usually solitary or lonely figures, often self-absorbed, who dwell in a landscape that typically heightens their isolation. These singular individuals seclude themselves from the world through reading and study but are drawn unwittingly into larger events. In “A Lodging for the Night,” Francis Villon searches for a place to sleep on a cold winter night in 1456 and encounters de Brisetout, a nobleman who accepts him as a guest “for this evening, and no more” (p. 248). The two talk away the night discussing ethical issues, such as “the riddle of … life” (p. 241) and the possibility of immortality in a world ruled by chance; and they discuss art and the futility of human endeavor. But before encountering de Brisetout, Villon has found a woman of the streets frozen to death. After Villon leaves, we are forced to consider not only the circumstances of wealth and poverty, but the overriding circumstance of death. In Stevenson's fiction, Menikoff suggests, “we cannot understand life until we recognize and acknowledge the fact of death” (p. 22).

One might say the stories are not “recollections in tranquility” but recollections in ambiguity. Stevenson's characters frequently exist in a duality of unresolved tension, even of open conflict, as do Jekyll and Hyde. The doubleness of human nature or of good and evil can be found in many stories from this volume, as Menikoff's examples prove. He argues persuasively that, because the stories are often open-ended and moral issues unresolved, Stevenson contributes to the beginning of the modernist movement. His major characters are isolated and without a moral center; their lives are determined by fortuitous circumstances; their thoughts and behavior are frequently linked to questions of good and evil, but the mystery of evil is never resolved. What remains is a fundamental doubt about the human ability to possess complete knowledge. Stevenson's characters seem to be caught in shadows, Menikoff explains, a half-light that is pervasive in the texts: while the action is complete at the end of each tale, the resolution is subverted on a broader, thematic level, showing that ambiguity is not only part of our language but a condition of our existence.

The stories that Menikoff has selected for Tales from the Prince of Storytellers come from New Arabian Nights (1882), The Merry Men and Other Tales and Fables (1887), and Island Nights' Entertainments (1893), and they are arranged in the order in which they were first published. Three stories from The Suicide Club and four from The Rajah's Diamond begin the collection, and these are followed by “The Pavilion on the Links” and “The Lodging for the Night”—all from New Arabian Nights and written between 1877 and 1880. From The Merry Men are the title story and “Markheim,” and from Island Nights' Entertainment come “The Bottle Imp” and “The Isle of Voices.” While these are among Stevenson's best tales, there are certainly others that warrant attention, as Menikoff suggests, and he quotes from several, including “The Sire de Maléroit's Door,” “Providence and the Guitar,” and “Will o' the Mill.” One might have wished for “The Story of a Lie” (written 1879), “The Body Snatcher” (1881), “The Treasure of Franchard” (1882), “Olalla” (1885), “The Misadventures of John Nicholson” (1886), and “The Enchantress” (1888?), though generous reviewers might assume that there was not space in the current volume to include all of these. But the selection does lead to the hope that Northwestern University Press will encourage Menikoff to produce a second volume in which these and other stories may be incorporated. With Menikoff's edition of The Beach at Falesa (1984; paperback, 1987), printed from Stevenson's original manuscript, readers could then have available soundly edited texts of the entire short tales of Stevenson.

Despite the absence of certain stories, readers should appreciate the inclusion of two transcribed holograph manuscripts in Menikoff's edition. We briefly compared Menikoff's transcription of the manuscript of “Markheim” with the book text of 1887, though we were unable to consult the earlier version, from Unwin's Christmas Annual for 1885. While Menikoff mentions little about the Victorian editorial changes, we generally found the manuscript version to be of higher quality than that of the text in The Merry Men and Other Tales and Fables (and we assume most reprinted versions of this collection). Early in the story, for instance, Markheim is supposedly searching for a gift to give his fiancée at a Christmas evening dinner later that day, and the antique dealer offers him a fifteenth-century hand mirror. Markheim acts as if he is shocked by the offer, and the dealer remarks: “Your future lady, sir, must be pretty hard favoured.” Markheim's response in the manuscript (Menikoff ed., p. 301, lines 33–37) is as follows (omissions in the 1887 text italicized):

“No,” said Markheim, with great conviction. “But about you: I ask you for a Christmas present and you give me this—this damned reminder of years and sins and follies, this hand-conscience!”

The book text (1887) reads:

‘I ask you,’ said Markheim, ‘for a Christmas present, and you give me this—this damned reminder of years, and sins and follies—this hand-conscience!’

In the manuscript version, Markheim reacts more determinedly, and he alters the direction of their conversation to find out more about the dealer who would make such an offer. In the manuscript version, too, this interchange arouses a tension between the two men, as Markheim perceives that he and his lady have been insulted. Thus, with Menikoff's manuscript reading, Markheim's actions appear more strongly motivated. The importance of the mirror in each version is strongly symbolic.

Another example shows Stevenson's prose to be more effective than his nineteenth-century editor allowed. After Markheim has murdered the dealer, he goes upstairs in search of money, yet he is suddenly petrified with fear. Menikoff's transcription of the manuscript reads (p. 308, lines 15–21; omissions in 1887 text italicized):

He could never again, he felt, be sufficiently immured and fortified from men's observing eyes; the sole joy for which he longed was to be home, girt in by walls, buried among bed clothes, and invisible to all but God. And at the [that, 1887] thought he wondered a little, recollecting tales of other murderers and the fear they were said to entertain of heavenly avengers.

By omitting the phrase “the sole joy for which he longed,” the unknown editor has preempted the contrast of joy with “fear,” in the following sentence. It would seem that Stevenson wanted to contrast these states of mind to show Markheim's widely fluctuating emotions. While the 1887 text may be simpler (“he longed to be home”), it misses the complexity of the original. Only occasionally, in our spot checking, did we find the earlier editor rendering a service to Stevenson; for example “like an actor on a theatre” (p. 309, line 9) is corrected to “like an actor on a stage” in the 1887 text. Nevertheless, the manuscript version discloses that the material deleted in the printed editions usually illuminates the interior emotions of Markheim.

Some critics have considered Stevenson's short fiction merely a literary apprenticeship, yet his preoccupation with the short story lasted throughout his life. He experimented with folktales, allegories, thrillers, psychological dramas, comedies of manners, atmospheric tales, fables, and tales of adventure. Others have thought his tales limited by their focus on male characters. One should not overlook the important part females play in several of the stories. In “The Pavilion on the Links,” for instance, Clara Huddleston assists the narrator, Frank Cassilis, in defending the pavilion (and her father) against the attack by their foreign adversaries. Mary Darnaway, in “The Merry Men,” supports her irrational father in his personal crisis. It is Kokua, in “The Bottle Imp,” who comes up with the idea about how Keawe can rid himself of the bottle. And in “The Enchantress,” not included in this collection, Emmeline Croft demonstrates an ability to protect her inheritance through bold actions and shrewd legal arrangements.

Menikoff urges both scholars and the general public to read (or to reread) Stevenson's short fiction, and the notes and the glossary of Scottish terms he provides will be valuable for both audiences. While we might ask for more geographical details about specific settings, such as the rocky west coast of Scotland in “The Merry Men,” or a few additions to the glossary, like coble (a row boat) from the same story, Menikoff has certainly made the texts more accessible to modern readers. His substantial introductory essay, which brings to light underlying philosophical ideas in Stevenson's short fiction, will guide readers at the end of the twentieth century to a greater appreciation of the tales. Anyone interested in the short story, late nineteenth-century fiction, or Stevenson will certainly want a copy of this collection. It is a good year to celebrate Robert Louis Stevenson, and time to recognize his contribution to the development of the short story.