A University of Chichester Professor has been given permission for a literary injustice stretching back nearly 120 years to be put right.
Robert Louis Stevenson is most famous for writing the novels Treasure Island and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde but also penned some fairy tales while living in Samoa. He hoped to have a volume of these fairy tales published together prior to his death in 1894. However, back in London his literary agent Sidney Colvin colluded with Stevenson's publisher, Cassell, to disregard the author's wishes, and the fairy tales appeared with other material, and in a form contrary to Stevenson's explicit instructions, in Island Nights' Entertainments, which has remained the standard edition ever since.
However, Bill Gray, Professor of Literary History at the University of Chichester, and Director of the Sussex Centre for Folklore, Fairy Tales and Fantasy, has convinced Edinburgh University Press to publish a new volume of Stevenson's fairy tales. This will be the closest publishers have ever got to what Stevenson actually planned, but was never able to complete because of distance, editorial interference and ultimately his death.
Professor Gray said: “Stevenson wanted to publish a volume of fairy tales, but living in Samoa, with letters taking months to get a reply from London, he was at the mercy of his literary agent, who effectively stitched Stevenson up by publishing his fairy tales together with another realistic story that the author had never intended to appear alongside his stories of magic and the supernatural.
“I'm delighted Edinburgh University Press has agreed to the publication of a new edition of Stevenson's fairy tales. ‘The Bottle Imp' and ‘The Isle of Voices' will be supplemented by another tale, ‘The Waif Woman', which Stevenson wrote for the collection but was ditched by his agent. It will be the first time they have been published together as a group, just as Stevenson intended.”
Professor Gray's edition will also publish for the first time all of Stevenson's Fables collected in one volume. Some of Stevenson's Fables were published in 1896, but Professor Gray's edition will be the first time they have all been published together and in the order that Stevenson wanted, based on the original manuscripts housed in the British Library and the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University.
Professor Gray's volume of Stevenson's Fables and Fairy Tales is scheduled to appear in 2013, as part of The New Edinburgh Edition of Stevenson's Works, planned as the definitive collection of the works of Robert Louis Stevenson to be published by Edinburgh University Press in conjunction with Edinburgh University, of which Professor Gray is an alumnus.
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