The Master of Ballantrae

by Robert Louis Stevenson

The Master of Ballantrae is Stevenson’s darkest book, the strange tale of two Durie brothers whose differences symbolize the conflicting calls of romance and reason in 18th-century Scotland. Stevenson called this novel 'a winter's tale', as if he were revisiting the brighter worlds of Kidnapped and Treasure Island in a bleaker light, as if the old romances could only lead us now to a wilderness of disorder, emptiness, coldness and night. The story's conclusion bears this out: the two brothers ar