The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and MR Hyde and Weir of Hermiston

by Robert Louis Stevenson

Book Overview

The famous spine-chiller Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde plus Weir of Hermiston, a brilliant, autobiographical portrait of a father-son relationship.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0192834312
• ISBN13: 9780192834317
• Release Date: July 1998
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
• Length: 272 Pages
• Weight: 0.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 7.6" x 5.0"

Customer Reviews

Weir of Hermiston

I bought this book because I wanted to read WEIR OF HERMISTON, which is hard to find these days. WEIR OF HERMISTON is a sort of gothic romance novel, it is the book that Stevenson was working on when he died, and is considered by some to be one of "the great unfinished novels." I did enjoy reading it, but the story was just getting good when Stevenson finally succumbed to his lifelong health problems and died. WEIR OF HERMISTON is reminiscent of Thomas Hardy's work, and it is a pity that Stevenson never got to finish it. Is it great literature? I wouldn't say so, but rough drafts rarely are. I recommend against reading Stevenson's friends descriptions of the ending he had planned. Such testaments are inevitably trite, spoiling, and cannot be trusted anyway. Authors often change their minds about plot points, endings -- pretty much everything. I give the book five stars, because of course DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE is a brilliant literary work, and because I'm a Robert Louis Stevenson fan.

Two faced man

This is a great book for all sorts of people, It is great how Robert Louis Stevenson describes Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. It is great on how the author uses both sides as a twisted sence of human. Mr Hyde a high hung man, Wants to cause havok every where he goes, Brutal murders etc, Dr Jekyll, Kind of a mad sientist, Wants to create a cure for the mentally ill. This is a great book, I would recommend this to anyone.

Leaves the 'great' Victorians flailing.

The first half of this novella can be counted among the most remarkable writing I have ever read. its sense of unstated terror and crisp, nightmarish atmosphere; its portentous introduction and proliferation of the double theme; its destabilising of its own narrative, where the violence of the language and the force of the metaphors makes the abstract material, and the material abstract; its evocation of London as a menacing organism, a miasma-wheezing labyrinth, with an economy that defeated Dickens, with streets and buildings embodying human flaws; its characterisation of a grim, barren, self-destructive men's world - all this take the novel away from the generic sensationalism or pseudo-scientific philosophy of the horror genre towards the metaphysical anxieties of Chesterton and Borges.The rest is more familiar, made complex by innovative structure, ambiguous narration and a startling use of imagery. this is not a simple tale of man's good and evil side; in its admission of an ungraspable, shifting, multifarious existence, shown here in character, place and language, where metamorphosis is the only rule, we can see why Nabokov considers Stevenson a master. And yet the book also works as a lean, compelling thriller, even if, like everyone, you already know the twist. Emma Letley's introduction and notes are over a decade old, and need updating.