About “Treasure Island,” you wrote “Stevenson insisted that there be no women in the book,” but in fact it was his stepson who insisted. As Stevenson wrote to a friend, “No women in the story, Lloyd’s orders; and who so blithe to obey?”

He also wrote, “If this don’t fetch the kids, why, they have gone rotten since my day,” and “Two chapters are written, and have been tried on Lloyd with great success; the trouble is to work it off without oaths. Buccaneers without oaths – bricks without straw. But youth and the fond parient have to be consulted.”