The Black Arrow: A Tale of Two Roses

by Robert Louis Stevenson

Overview

"The Black Arrow" is what every book about the Middle Ages should be and more, with suspense, action, disguises, escapes, and of course, the occasional love scene. Robert Louis Stevenson lived in the mid-1800s, and is renowned for his many works, including Treasure Island, Dr.Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Kidnapped. The Black Arrow, written originally for a magazine, was written after Stevenson's recovery from a serious illness and published right after Treasure Island. Dick Shelton, a boy of sixteen, is quickly thrust into the conflict of the War of the Roses. He battles against almost any kind of evil - bloodthirsty pirates, a murderous priest, and even his own legal guardian - Sir Daniel Brackley. Through the whole book Dick strives to become a knight and rescue his true love. Although most likely the least known of Stevenson's great adventure novels, "The Black Arrow" is the best in the eyes of many.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781494838522
Publisher:	CreateSpace Publishing
Publication date:	12/30/2013
Pages:	166
Product dimensions:	7.00(w) x 10.00(h) x 0.35(d)

About the Author

Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson (1850-1894) was a Scottish novelist, poet, essayist and travel writer. His best-known books include Treasure Island, Kidnapped, and Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. A literary celebrity during his lifetime, Stevenson now ranks among the 26 most translated authors in the world. He has been greatly admired by many authors, including Jorge Luis Borges, Ernest Hemingway, Rudyard Kipling, Marcel Schwob, Vladimir Nabokov, J. M. Barrie, and G. K. Chesterton, who said of him that he "seemed to pick the right word up on the point of his pen, like a man playing spillikins." Stevenson was a celebrity in his own time, but with the rise of modern literature after World War I, he was seen for much of the 20th century as a writer of the second class, relegated to children's literature and horror genres. Condemned by literary figures such as Virginia Woolf (daughter of his early mentor Leslie Stephen) and her husband Leonard, he was gradually excluded from the canon of literature taught in schools. His exclusion reached a height when in the 1973 2,000-page Oxford Anthology of English Literature Stevenson was entirely unmentioned; and The Norton Anthology of English Literature excluded him from 1968 to 2000 (1st-7th editions), including him only in the 8th edition (2006). The late 20th century saw the start of a re-evaluation of Stevenson as an artist of great range and insight, a literary theorist, an essayist and social critic, a witness to the colonial history of the Pacific Islands, and a humanist. Even as early as 1965 the pendulum had begun to swing: he was praised by Roger Lancelyn Green, one of the Oxford Inklings, as a writer of a consistently high level of "literary skill or sheer imaginative power" and a co-originator with H. Rider Haggard of the Age of the Story Tellers. He is now being re-evaluated as a peer of authors such as Joseph Conrad (whom Stevenson influenced with his South Seas fiction), and Henry James, with new scholarly studies and organizations devoted to Stevenson. No matter what the scholarly reception, Stevenson remains popular worldwide.

Date of Birth:

November 13, 1850

Date of Death:

December 3, 1894

Place of Birth:

Edinburgh, Scotland

Place of Death:

Vailima, Samoa

Education:

Edinburgh University, 1875

Table of Contents

	Prologue	3
Book I	The Two Lads
	At the Sign of the Sun in Kettley	19
	In the Fen	27
	The Fen Ferry	33
	A Greenwood Company	40
	"Bloody as the Hunter"	47
	To the Day's End	55
	The Hooded Face	61
Book II	The Moat House
	Dick Asks Questions	70
	The Two Oaths	78
	The Room over the Chapel	85
	The Passage	91
	How Dick Changed Sides	96
Book III	My Lord Foxham
	The House by the Shore	105
	A Skirmish in the Dark	112
	Saint Bride's Cross	118
	The Good Hope	121
	The Good Hope (continued)	129
	The Good Hope (concluded)	135
Book IV	The Disguise
	The Den	141
	"In Mine Enemies' House"	148
	The Dead Spy	156
	In the Abbey Church	163
	Earl Risingham	172
	Arblaster Again	176
Book V	Crookback
	The Shrill Trumpet	186
	The Battle of Shoreby	193
	The Battle of Shoreby (concluded)	199
	The Sack of Shoreby	203
	Night in the Woods--Alicia Risingham	212
	Night in the Woods (concluded)--Dick and Joan	219
	Dick's Revenge	228
	Conclusion	232