This book studies how Stevenson wrote about France, how he interpreted French literature, how he incorporated French into his writing, and how and why the earliest French critics translated, disseminated and interpreted his work. It does so in the context of the debates surrounding the development of the novel at the end of the nineteenth century. While Stevenson was sometimes dismissed as a writer of genre fiction, this study aims to show that he was held in high regard by the beacons of the intellectual establishment in France, who co-opted him in the mutiny against Naturalism and held up his novels as models of generic and stylistic innovation. It also shows how artistic debates taking place in France influenced the evolution of Stevenson’s theory of art. Situating Stevenson and his work within the context of Franco-British literary relations opens up new ways of approaching his oeuvre, offers new insights into the transnational nature of nineteenth-century literature and allows us to think of him not only as a Scottish author, but as an English-language author writing in a French tradition. By approaching Stevenson and his fiction from this angle, this book hopes to add to our understanding of what Ian Duncan has referred to as the ‘complex networks of affiliation that bind Scottish literature […] to other literatures and cultures’ and in this way confirm Stevenson’s own assertion that ‘the mere extent of a man’s travels has in it something consolatory. That he should have left friends or enemies in many different and distant quarters, gives a sort of earthly dignity to his existence.’ Figuratively, Stevenson met some of his first literary friends when reading French literature and he continued to visit these friends long after he left the country; the French artistic community in turn embraced Stevenson as a friend, lending dignity to his work when it was in the process of being diminished by English-language critics and writers of the Modernist period.