A Marriage That Changed Literary History

Fanny Stevenson forced her husband, Robert Louis Stevenson, to live a bigger life than he had known. When Fanny met Louis in 1876, he was not yet Robert Louis Stevenson, the author of Treasure Island, Kidnapped, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, A Child’s Garden of Verses. He was a scrawny, sickly, rotten-toothed, chain-smoking, 25-year-old literary wannabe who had published a few essays and reviews and was financially dependent on his parents, constantly squabbling with them over how—as they saw it—he was wasting his life, denying God, and generally going to hell in a handbasket.

The Stevensons in the South Seas

Fanny Vandegrift Osbourne was 36, 11 years older than Louis, an American, a wife, and a mother. Originally from Indiana, she had married at 17, quickly had a baby, and followed Sam Osbourne, her good-looking and good-natured but feckless husband, to mining camps in the West, where he tried unsuccessfully to strike it rich.

Camille Peri’s engrossing A Wilder Shore: The Romantic Odyssey of Fanny and Robert Louis Stevenson recounts in some detail the very unromantic odyssey that led Fanny to her meeting with Louis.

Fanny’s first go at marriage revealed little inclination to martyrdom on anyone’s part. Sam Osbourne regularly visited brothels around the camp and left her for months on quixotic quests for wealth. Finally, fed up with camp life and believing Sam to be dead, Fanny took their daughter, Belle, to San Francisco, where she eked out a living as a seamstress.

“The struggle to keep working was constant. Louis sometimes spent days in bed, speaking only in whispers and writing prone, for fear of bringing on more hemorrhaging, and sometimes he could not read, write, or even see.”

Fanny and Louis fell in love almost at first glance, though between the two of them, it is hard to say who was the less impressive catch, the abandoned and abandoning wife or the sickly post-adolescent.

For Louis, an overprotected man who resented his upbringing and expected all women to be delicate tyrants like his mother, Fanny’s glamour was immense. He had never encountered an American woman outside of books, and she was an unusually unconventional specimen.

Without Fanny’s care, Louis might have died before they could be married in San Francisco, in May 1880, four years after they met and five months after she and Sam divorced. Fanny was 40, Louis almost 30, and from then on, it is fair to say that she kept him alive.

The writing desk of Robert Louis Stevenson

They honeymooned, eccentrically, in an abandoned silver mine in the hills in Napa Valley, with Fanny’s son Lloyd and Chuchu, their dog.

I am fully convinced by A Wilder Shore that without Fanny, the great body of work created by Robert Louis Stevenson in his truncated life of 44 years would not exist.

The struggle to keep working was constant. Louis sometimes spent days in bed, speaking only in whispers and writing prone, for fear of bringing on more hemorrhaging, and sometimes he could not read, write, or even see.

One would like to imagine their final years in the South Seas as a beachside vacation, a reward for their difficulties, but sadly this was no stay at Club Med.

I admire the way they lived, genuine bohemians who seem to have cared only about staying alive and living intensely, always resourceful, unfussy, and open to new experiences.

It is probably clear that I love this couple. I love both of them. I love their incongruity, the tiny round woman who came up to the bony man’s chest. His gift. Her gifts. Their devotion to each other.

If only it were possible to tell a gender-bending story like this one without having to point out how gender-bending it is.

The Stevensons in their later years