Letter sold for £4500

A "LOST letter" from Robert Louis Stevenson to the English Governor of Fiji, who had threatened to deport him from his Samoan home, has fetched more than £4500 at auction.

The Treasure Island novelist wrote the 118-year-old letter on December 27, 1893, a year before his death at the age of 44.

Stevenson had settled in the South Seas in search of a climate more suited to his delicate health than that of his native Edinburgh.

The letter to Sir John Thurston was sold at Bonhams in London yesterday to an anonymous private collector.