Robert Louis Stevenson

Olalla Robert Louis Stevenson

"Olalla" is a short story by the Scottish novelist, poet, essayist and travel writer Robert Louis Stevenson. It was first published in the Christmas 1885 issue of The Court and Society Review, then re-published in 1887 as part of the collection The Merry Men and Other Tales and Fables. It is set in Spain during the Peninsular War. "Olalla" contains many of the trademark elements of Gothic fiction. There is a once-proud family of failing nobility, a lonely home in a mountain setting and a preoccupation with death and decay. Stevenson also focuses on the subject of heredity, demonstrated by a family portrait to which Olalla bears an uncanny resemblance. This was a very popular Gothic device, famously employed by Sheridan Le Fanu in his short story "Carmilla" and by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in the Sherlock Holmes novel The Hound of the Baskervilles.