Questions of what it means to be a man or a gentleman, and how being a writer does or does not evidence those qualities, run throughout much of Stevenson’s and Borges’s prose writings and are evident in the titles of some of the essays in this volume.

That essay-writing was of great importance to Stevenson is clear from this anthology: that it was crucial to Borges is evident from his fiction and non-fiction. As the eminent Mexican poet Octavio Paz wrote: ‘He [Borges] cultivated three genres: the essay, the poem and the short story. The division is arbitrary. His essays read like stories, his stories are poems; and his poems make us think as though they were essays.’

If it seems like Stevenson had a more profound influence on Borges than on Bioy, that is because this was the case. And it’s reasonable to say that Borges had a stronger influence on Bioy than Bioy had on Borges; Bioy once said that an evening spent collaborating with Borges was the equivalent of a year of solitary writing. Works by Stevenson and H.G. Wells were literally the first books that Borges handled and the affinity Borges felt for Stevenson is implicit and explicit in his prose, poetry, talks and interviews.

Near life-long friends, Borges and Bioy, in a happy analogue to the doubleness that exists in their own writing and, of course, in Stevenson’s, often merged into the same writer. They wrote, for example, detective stories, screenplays and fantastic fiction under the pseudonym H. Bustos Dumecq. (Some of their friends smilingly called this dual writer ‘Biorges’.) Stevenson also collaborated – with poet and critic W.E. Henley, with wife Fanny and with stepson Lloyd Osbourne – but it is fair to say that both he and Borges achieved their finest, most influential and most original work when writing solo.

Borges once wrote that the primary tropes of fantastic literature are but four in number – the work within the work, the journey through time, the interplay of reality and dream, and the double. The latter two elements are especially pertinent in Stevenson’s and Borges’s lives and literary output. Stevenson wrote to F.H. Myers, a founder of the Society for Psychical Research, of which Stevenson was a member, that when feverish he felt he had ‘two consciousnesses’. Duality features in many of Stevenson’s works – The Master of Ballantrae, ‘Markheim’, Catriona, etc., with the most famous example being the Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, which Borges considered first and foremost a detective story. Borges liked to point out that the two names in the title implicitly persuade the reader from the start that we are dealing with two different characters. (In a review of a movie version of Jekyll and Hyde (the third most-filmed story of all time), Borges once suggested that the best way to make a film version work would be to have two different actors playing the respective title roles.) Doubles feature in many of Borges’s writings, including ‘The Theologians’, ‘The South’ and ‘The Shape of the Sword’. In ‘The Theologians’, two enemies discover that they are the same man. Borges was more likely to make a coward the ultimate hero of a story than to use a traditional protagonist. Almost every story in Borges’s later work Dr Brodie’s Report (the name echoing a famous Stevenson connection) is about two characters in opposition to each other. Borges believed human beings embodied the heroic and the tragic – being both dreamer and dream at once. Balderston notes:

Both writers are fascinated by the motif of the double because of its usefulness in creating characters who can be identified by opposition to one another, that is, defined from the outside, without recurring to a specious psychology.

Borges occasionally wrote of himself as a character – as Stevenson sometimes does in his essays – not in a manner that is self-involved or egotistical but analytical and born of genuine intellectual inquiry. For example, Borges the rather shy librarian considers Borges the internationally famous writer and ends up wondering which of the two is writing down those very thoughts at that point in time.

Borges said:

I am interested in the feeling I get every morning when I wake up and find that I am Borges . . . It is something deep down within myself – the fact that I feel constrained to be a particular individual, living in a particular city, in a particular time, and so on. This might be thought of as a variation of the Jekyll and Hyde motif. Stevenson thought of the division in ethical terms, but here the division is hardly ethical . . .