Writing in 1894 to artist Will Low, Robert Louis Stevenson expressed frustration about the significance of his literary output in light of the careers of his father and grandfather: “I ought to have been able to build lighthouses and write David Balfours too” (24). While Robert Louis Stevenson, unlike his ancestors, did not build lighthouses, Roslyn Jolly's new book emphasizes the author's “diversification” of his work as a writer during the final years of his life spent in the Pacific (25), rethinking Stevenson's reputation in light of his often neglected nonfiction writings about the Pacific.

Examining the seven years preceding Stevenson's death in 1894, Jolly contends that this period was marked by a shift in the author's sense of his profession: the writer associated with adventure, the romance, and the pleasures of a well-turned phrase took to writing nonfiction works about the South Seas, works informed by anthropology, history, and the law. Reacting to the death of his father in 1887, Stevenson departed from England and its literary scene to relocate, after his many travels, on the island of Upolu in Samoa. Free from his father's overbearing presence and immersed in a new environment, the bohemian champion of idleness and l’art pour l’art contemplated how his works might act on the world around him and how they might be brought in line with the “ancestral models of vocational value and success” that had been adopted by Stevenson's father and grandfather (23). Jolly's study excels in showing how Stevenson developed in relation to these other vocational models while in the South Seas, returning to his earlier interest in historical writing and drawing upon his legal education.

The three central chapters of the book focus on Stevenson's serious engagements with discourses outside of the literary fare on which he had built his reputation before 1887. One chapter examines Stevenson's use of anthropological discourse and comparative jurisprudence in his writings on the cultures of the Pacific islands published as In the South Seas (1896). Another explores the author's historiographic work in his short history of Samoan politics in relation to German, American, and British colonial influence, A Footnote to History (1892). The third parallels Stevenson's legal arguments about Samoa in his letters to The Times with the legal conundrums that plague David Balfour, the protagonist of Stevenson's 1893 novel Catriona, the sequel to his Scottish adventure classic, Kidnapped (1886). Each of these chapters provides an exemplary account of the events and sources that influenced Stevenson as well as the nuances of the texts in question. Each chapter culminates in an extensive look at how such writings were received by an often-circumspect British public. Jolly makes careful use of many of the public and private responses to Stevenson's nonfiction writings about the South Seas, drawing attention to the nuances of such responses in order to depict the complexities of Stevenson's reputation as a writer. Her section on Stevenson's engagement with legal discourse is one of the hallmarks of the book, as she shows how Stevenson's background in the law shaped his anthropological writings and his critique of colonial governance. Jolly's knowledge in this area marks this book as a key contribution to recent discussions of Stevenson's Pacific writings in works by Oliver Buckton and Julia Reid.

Robert Louis Stevenson in the Pacific is most captivating, however, in its last chapter, in which Jolly outlines the public's selective reimagining of Stevenson's reputation during his time in the Pacific and after his death. Jolly recounts how Stevenson's varied, challenging professional output in his last years—a blend of Scottish romances and nonfiction about Pacific cultures and Samoan politics—was distorted in its metropolitan reception. Stevenson's friends, including Sidney Colvin, Henry James, and Edmund Gosse, downplayed writings such as A Footnote to History as lesser works while they perpetuated the myth of Stevenson as the renowned “Tusitala” (selectively translated from Samoan as “teller of tales”). Through a careful reading of reviews and correspondence, Jolly demonstrates how Stevenson's complicated engagement with local and international Samoan politics was overshadowed by European accounts of the author as a deeply charismatic purveyor of oral tales who was never quite at home in Samoa. The book is especially provocative in tracing the influence of British exoticism, ethnocentrism, and imperialist fantasy in the genealogy of Stevenson's reputation as Tusitala. Jolly shows the public in London representing Stevenson as a combination of Prospero and Rajah Brooke, an almost supernatural figure who received constant reverence and deference from a dazzled native populace. As a consequence of this myth, Stevenson's nuanced contributions to anthropology and Samoan politics were belittled and ignored.

Correcting this misconception, Jolly's well-argued and provocative study of Stevenson in the Pacific is essential reading for all critics of Stevenson's varied output and for those seeking a better understanding of modes of authorship in the 1890s. The only possible reservation about Robert Louis Stevenson in the Pacific follows from the book's scope. Since Jolly concentrates on how Stevenson's “vocational diversity” was disregarded due to the author's reputation as a writer of fiction, “the book is concerned with Stevenson's Pacific fiction only as it illustrates and resonates with his non-fiction” (27). While this limitation seems entirely logical given the parameters of the argument, Jolly's previous scholarship on Stevenson's South Seas fiction proves her expertise on works such as The Ebb-Tide (1894) and “The Beach of Falesá” (in Island Nights’ Entertainments [1893]). Awareness of this expertise leaves the reader desiring more discussion of the Pacific fiction in light of the book's significant conclusion. Yet this desire for more of a focus on fiction may be yet another holdover of the Stevenson-as-Tusitala myth that Jolly debunks so thoroughly and satisfyingly in this crucial contribution to Stevenson studies.