The Beach of Falesá

"The Beach of Falesá" is a short story by Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson. It was first published in the "Illustrated London News" in 1892, and later published in book form in the short-story collection "Island Nights' Entertainments" (1893). It was written after Stevenson moved to the South Seas island of Samoa just a few years before he died there.

Stevenson saw "The Beach of Falesá" as the ground-breaking work in his turn away from romanticism to realism. Stevenson wrote to his friend Sidney Colvin:

In an unusual change for Stevenson, but in-line with realism, the plot of the story is less important, rather the realistic portrayal of the manners of various social classes in island society is foregrounded; it is essentially a novel of manners. As Stevenson says to Colvin in a letter, "The Beach of Falesá" is "well fed with facts" and "true to the manners' of the society it depicts." Other than the island itself which is fictional, it contains the names of real people, real ships and real buildings which Stevenson was familiar with from his personal travels in the South Seas.

"The Beach of Falesá", along with his two other South Seas tales in "Island Nights' Entertainments", were generally poorly received by his peers in London. Stevenson was known and loved for his historical romances such as "Treasure Island", "Kidnapped" and "The Master of Ballantrae" and so his shift to realism was not widely applauded. Oscar Wilde complained "I see that romantic surroundings [Samoa] are the worst surroundings possible for a romantic writer. In Gower Street Stevenson could have written a new "Trois Mousquetaires". In Samoa he wrote letters to "The Times" about Germans." Edmund Gosse wrote "The fact seems to be that it is very nice to "live" in Samoa, but not healthy to "write" there." Modern scholarship and the reflection of time has been more kind to Stevenson's late works. What his critics could not see or know at the time is that modernism was just around the corner and Stevenson had begun to experiment with early forms, along with a critique of the European colonial venture (post-colonialism), something most people in the 1890s were not interested in hearing, but within a decade or so, such as with Joseph Conrad, would become fashionable.

Notes

External links

* [http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=The%20Beach%20of%20Falesa%20AND%20mediatype%3Atexts "The Beach of Falesá"] at Internet Archive