Where I wanted to find affinities, had I imagined them?įrom what follows the reader will be able to judge between three possible explanations: 1. I fell from the clouds (as they say in Italian). Then I learnt that Gide recorded reading ‘Olalla’ in his Journal the year after he wrote Isabelle. This conviction was strengthened by my knowledge that Gide belonged to a group of of French writers and critics before and after 1900 who admired Stevenson and saw him as a model who could help the French novel find a new way forward. Such were the affinities in characters, settings, events and even atmosphere that I was sure that Gide must have taken Stevenson’s tale as a conscious inspiration. I recently read André Gide’s novella Isabelle (first published in 1911) and, as I did so, was continually reminded of Stevenson’s long short story ‘Olalla’.
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