Photo by A Marriage That Changed Literary History
Fanny Stevenson, the wife of Robert Louis Stevenson, forced her husband to live a bigger life than he had known. Their meeting in 1876 changed the course of literary history.
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. The book is weighted toward her, partly because Fanny is, in fact, the more colorful of the two Stevensons and partly because of Peri’s underlying feminist project: to do justice to an often-vilified woman.
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. Each responded to the other’s core vitality.
A photo of Robert Louis Stevenson.
Their life became not so much a search for health as a notably adventurous campaign to hold off death. 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.
In addition to her dozens of other creative modes, Fanny had written and published short stories, including some fantasy tales for children, turning to this as she had to needlework as a way of making money.
A photo of Fanny Stevenson.
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. Much of their time was spent sailing about the Pacific, because Louis found sea air good for his lungs.
A photo of Robert Louis Stevenson
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.
