• Watercolour landscape showing a coastline with building and mine shafts dotted along the shore. In the background there are fields leading to hills.

An unfinished masterpiece by Robert Louis Stevenson

By Gillian Hughes Many of Stevenson’s longer works of fiction might be characterised as historical novels: in Weir of Hermiston Stevenson excavates Edinburgh’s Golden Age, that of Sir Walter Scott and James Hogg, and also its surviving physical traces in the…