AN INTRIGUING MAN: A portrait of Arthur Ransome taken in Moscow between 1915 and 1917. Reproduced with the permission of Special Collections, The Brotherton Library, University of Leeds, and by permission of The Arthur Ransome Literary Estate.

A nearly-finished biography of Robert Louis Stevenson gathered dust for 76 years, forgotten about, until it was discovered in a solicitor’s vault. Now, thanks to the painstaking work of an editor and a publisher – both from Suffolk – we can finally read both Arthur Ransome’s lost work and a story he wrote as a child. Steven Russell reports

HARD GOING: A page of the Stevenson manuscript showing Ransome's hand at its most legible!; Reproduced with the permission of Special Collections, The Brotherton Library, University of Leeds, and by permission of The Arthur Ransome Literary Estate

AT the start of May, 1914, Arthur Ransome took delivery of a pair of top-quality new boots – perfect for his imminent trip to Russia, where he would spend the summer writing a book about St Petersburg. It wasn’t long before his highly-strung and volatile wife, Ivy, had recycled the stout brown-paper covering and wrapped up a bundle of handwritten pages. This new parcel was tied with string and the knots strengthened with red and black sealing-wax. Ivy addressed the package to the manager of Parr’s Bank, in London’s Regent Street, and wrote it should be “delivered on demand to – Arthur Ransome, Esq: or Mrs. Arthur Ransome”.

It’s impossible to know if the parcel was ever deposited at Parr’s, but it was never reclaimed and the papers inside were never reunited with their author, the man with the new footwear and today famous for his dozen novels in the Swallows and Amazons series. The package found its way, somehow, to a London solicitors’ office and appears to have been placed in the strong-room in May, 1947. There it appears to have slumbered until the legal practice came across it while inspecting the strong-room in 1990. With the writer and his wife both dead, the solicitors contacted the executors of Ransome’s literary estate. They in turn spoke to the University of Leeds, which already held many of his private papers.

After talks with Arthur and Ivy’s daughter Tabitha – then 79 – it was decided to lodge the parcel at the university’s Brotherton Library.

Special collections librarian Ann Farr travelled to London in 1993 to pick up the hefty pile of loose sheets, uncounted and unnumbered, in a big plastic shopping-bag. Luckily, she had the wit to ask about that original packaging. Happily, it was found and reunited with the documents.

THE WRAPS ARE OFF: Arthur Ransome's Long-Lost Study of Robert Louis Stevenson, from Boydell Press

Those documents were the text and working papers of a critical study of Ransome’s life-long literary hero, Robert Louis Stevenson – 387 sheets of small paper produced by the Company of Riga Papermaking Factories (in today’s Latvia). The first quarter of the book – biographical – was near-complete. In about 1910 Ransome had written a critical analysis of Edgar Allan Poe, while a study of Oscar Wilde was published in 1912. It was known he was working on an analysis of Stevenson – fitting it between other work – but no-one realised how close he’d been to finishing when he left for Tsarist Russia.

Literary executors Christina Hardyment and David Sewart were determined to put Ransome’s lost book in the spotlight. David and wife Elizabeth spent a decade making headway with a transcript, juggling the task with other commitments and grappling with sometimes indecipherable scrawls.

Then Christina Hardyment turned to publisher Boydell & Brewer, based near Woodbridge and in New York state, which has experience of such challenges – such as the books on Benjamin Britten’s correspondence.

As editor, Dr Kirsty Nichol Findlay, who lives near Sudbury, took a fresh look at the material. By happy chance, she adores both authors and says her parents “told me that I spoke my first words by joining in a Stevenson poem which they were reading to me”. The resulting book, Arthur Ransome’s Long-Lost Study of Robert Louis Stevenson, publishes Ransome’s lost analysis.

RURAL WRITER: Arthur Ransome - a man with a 'love of the countryside and walking, of quiet inns, of firesides, and of pipes of tobacco enjoyed in congenial company beside them; of folk-song and poetry, of books and their writers,' says Dr Kirsty Findlay

At a time when most books on Stevenson were solidly biographical or rather fawning, Ransome wanted his to be the first critical study, examining both the strengths and weaknesses of man and writer. Boydell says the book “is a fascinating . . . exposition by a yet-to-become-novelist of the writer who was to remain a lifelong inspiration. Here he wrestles to identify techniques that later underpin his Swallows and Amazons”.

Kirsty gives a full account of the manuscript’s life and sheds new light on Ransome’s extraordinary early career. There’s also an enlightening section on the tumultuous marriage to Ivy and his “escape” to Russia. A highlight, too, is the inclusion – and thus available to the public for the first time – of a Ransome tale written at the age of eight and plainly “a homage to Arthur’s favourite adventure story, Treasure Island”.

The Desert Island featured a boy called Jack whose father had disappeared – feared seized by a press-gang and taken to the South Seas. When he reaches the age of 14, Jack resolves to find him. “The completeness and detail of the story, and Arthur’s careful shaping of the book within such a physically small compass, are both remarkable,” writes Kirsty. “The notebook in which he wrote, carefully and in red ink, is no taller than an adult’s thumb.” Despite his admiration, Ransome “is no idolater. His purpose is to place him as accurately as possible among his peers, not to make extravagant claims. ‘He will not . . . except by a few enthusiasts of special temper, be counted among the greater writers’; and this may be because so often ‘the part is greater than the whole’.”

What did Ransome learn from Stevenson?

HERE BE TREASURES:The outside of the wrapping paper with string and sealing wax in which the Ransome papers were found. Reproduced with the permission of Special Collections, The Brotherton Library, University of Leeds, and by permission of The Arthur Ransome Literary Estate.

Well: “. . . about the difficulties of a first-person narrator; about how to leave the reader breathless at the end of a chapter; about narrative shape,” suggests Kirsty.

“Perhaps, like Graham Greene (a cousin of Stevenson’s) he learnt from him something of the ‘method of describing action without adjectives and adverbs.’”

Ransome noticed “the power of maps to lead young readers into adventure. He learnt the power and enticement of islands, in art as in life . . . he learnt about the importance of quest and romance. But he was his own man in demonstrating in his major fiction that the greatest treasure is to be found in human relationships, not in gold moidores.”

She says of Ransome’s narrative voice: “There is the pleasure of his sentences, always constructed with idiosyncratic rhythm, point, structure and flavour. There is his individual cast of mind, his love of the countryside and walking, of quiet inns, of firesides, and of pipes of tobacco enjoyed in congenial company beside them; of folk-song and poetry, of books and their writers.”

SWALLOWS AND AMAZONS: Arthur Ransome in later life

Kirsty had been a fan of Ransome since her childhood in rural New Zealand. “I think I was nearly eight when someone gave me a copy of Swallows and Amazons. I put off reading it for some time because I thought ‘Swallows? Well, they’re birds. Amazons? I remember asking my mother what they were. ‘Oh well; they’re a jungle tribe in South America who cut off their breasts so they can fire bows and arrows.’ Oh no!

“But then, of course, when I read the book I was immediately hooked, because there were children who had an interior life. They read things; they thought about things; they planned things.”

Kirsty got a scholarship to Cambridge in 1965 to do post-graduate work. After that came teaching, mostly at university level. She started as “a sort of specialist” in renaissance drama and also taught literature and poetry.

She’s been married for 20-odd years to the Rev Canon Brian Findlay, who looks after a number of parishes between Stowmarket and Sudbury.

Over the years she’s given many talks about the author. Naturally enough, she heard about the discovery of the papers. Then, out of the blue, the chief literary executor got in touch to ask “Can you do something with this manuscript?” The work spread over six years, around other commitments, and involved deciphering Ransome’s handwriting (a scrawl when he was tired, or writing fast), understanding his references (he was widely read) and getting to grips with an idiosyncratic method of working that did not put prototype pages in a coherent sequence or number them consecutively.

So why was his Stevenson project abandoned so near to completion?

In St Petersburg, Ransome had been alarmed by Germany’s sabre-rattling. After hostilities broke out, he became a war correspondent for the Daily News. He was, also, secretly retained by the British Government as a well-placed observer of developments in Russia. He was, says Kirsty, heavy-hearted in the autumn of 1914 – partly because his latest attempt at reconciliation with Ivy for their daughter’s sake had failed. Then there was the publication of a critical study of Stevenson by Frank Swinnerton that threatened to pull the rug from under his own nearly-finished book. “Thereafter, Ransome appears to have done no further work on his Stevenson. He became increasingly caught up in the currents of revolution and war in Russia . . . daily deadlines meant that he had little time for sustained literary work . . . His health deteriorated: he suffered appallingly from intestinal ulcers, and was lucky to survive an ineffective operation . . . He tells us [in other writings] that Methuen finally released him from his contract. Thereafter, we can safely assume that he regarded his book as ‘work abandoned’.” And what about the mystery of the parcel? The Stevenson project was still “live” when Ransome left for his summer in Russia. Kirsty feels Ivy had taken the initiative. “It seems likely that she went alone into Arthur’s study . . . that she impetuously gathered together a large quantity of papers, probably without his knowledge; and that she bundled them up in the brown paper in which his new boots had arrived. Her motive was not necessarily malicious; she may have seen this as a strategic move, a way of strengthening her bargaining position in the still unresolved dispute about the future of their marriage . . . She had taken control of them, and would give them back when he was in a more congenial frame of mind.”

• Arthur Ransome’s Long-Lost Study of Robert Louis Stevenson is published by Boydell Press at £30

Author and (temporary) East Anglian

• Arthur Ransome was born in January, 1884, in Leeds

• His father was a history professor

• Ransome’s ancestors founded the East Anglian engineering and agricultural implements firm Ransome & Rapier

• Arthur wanted to be a writer and in 1902 he landed a job with a London publisher

Soon, he was penning articles for literary magazines

• He married the volatile Ivy Walker in 1909 and they had a daughter

• By his late 20s, Ransome had established himself as a promising writer and a perceptive critic, with 14 books to his name

• The couple later divorced and Ransome in 1924 married a Russian lady, Evgenia Schelepina, to whom he was much better suited

• His 12 interconnected novels, the Swallows and Amazons series, were written between 1928 and 1948 and are the pinnacle of his long literary career

• In 1935 the Ransomes moved to Pin Mill, near Ipswich

• A keen sailor, he bought a seven-ton cutter he renamed Nancy Blackett

• His experiences in the boat on local rivers and the North Sea inspired the 1937 story We Didn’t Mean to Go to Sea

A couple of years later came Secret Water, set around the islands and creeks of Hamford Water, a kilometre north of Walton-on-the-Naze

• Ransome commissioned the building of a ketch that was built at Pin Mill and named Peter Duck

Today, it belongs to Essex-based writers Julia Jones and Francis Wheen, and can still be seen on the rivers of East Anglia

• By 1940 Ransome and Evgenia had moved to the Lake District

• Ransome died in hospital in Manchester in the summer of 1967, at the age of 83