A Marriage That Changed Literary History

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. His parents were righteous Scots. He was a flaky bohemian. The men in his family were lighthouse engineers, and his father wanted Louis to continue the tradition. Louis hated engineering. He wanted to write. They compromised on law. His father dangled the equivalent of $145,000 if he passed the bar exam, which he did, but he never practiced, choosing instead to hang out with friends, mostly writers and artists far from the parental home in Edinburgh.

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. Her father gave her a pocket pistol when she left home. She kept it in her bag and learned to shoot a rifle as well. She was one of 60 “respectable” women in a city with 6,000 men. Building furniture, sewing curtains, chopping wood, hauling water, stoking fires, making soap, shooting rattlesnakes, and, of course, cooking, she made a home of their rough quarters.

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. Stevenson biographies tend to be anti-Fanny, downplaying her role in his writing and blaming her for exaggerating his illness and working him to death. Peri’s is pro-Fanny. Her richly researched and vivid double portrait makes a convincing case that Fanny pulled off a rare feat, enabling Louis’s genius to mature while releasing his boyish energies.

[From the December 1887 issue: Robert Louis Stevenson]

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. Sam turned up eventually and got her pregnant again, but soon after their son Lloyd was born, in 1868, she bolted for the second time, going by ship down the California coast and through the Panama Canal (no transcontinental railroad yet) to New York, then back overland to her parents’ home in Indiana, where she stayed for a year. Some trip for a woman alone with two children.

Not long after, Sam, now working as a court stenographer in San Francisco and making decent money, prevailed on Fanny to return to him. While Fanny was pregnant with their second son, Hervey, Sam bought the family a little house in Oakland—and began spending most of his time across the bay in San Francisco. Fanny, Peri suggests, was not unhappy in her husband’s absence. Polymorphously creative, she painted, built a wet-plate-collodion darkroom, practiced marksmanship, and gardened seriously, for both food and beauty, pickling cantaloupes and grafting roses. She and Belle began to study art in San Francisco, commuting across the bay by side-wheel steamer while a helper cared for the boys. But Sam carried his faithlessness a step too far, when he tried to bring his current girlfriend into the Oakland household.

Again Fanny gathered the children and left him, this time for Europe, ostensibly to study art, with Sam promising to support them but again not always fulfilling his promises. In Paris in 1875, mother and daughter enrolled at the Académie Julian, an art school that, unusually, offered classes for women. But little Hervey’s health suddenly worsened, and doctors diagnosed tuberculosis. He died at the age of 5 in April. Fanny was devastated, Peri writes, her own robust emotional and physical health broken. Trying to recover, she went with her surviving children, Belle, now 17 years old, and Lloyd, who was 8, to an artists’ colony in Grez, near the Forest of Fontainebleau. She and Belle would spend the summer painting en plein air, escaping the city heat, and enjoying the company of like-minded artists.

[From the November 2001 issue: Robert Louis Stevenson’s swirling dreams]

Louis and his cousin and best friend, Bob Stevenson, had the same plan, and when they heard that two women would be among the artists at Grez, they were initially horrified. It was a guys-only thing, a kind of summer camp for artsy men. Bob went to Grez early to try to persuade Fanny and Belle to leave. But after he met them, he sent word back to Louis that it would be okay. They were “the right sort.”

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. His charisma was legendary. You can search the biographical record in vain for someone resistant to his wit and charm. Accounts of him mention his remarkably expressive eyes, conduits to his quicksilver soul. And she, though not an obvious beauty, too dark-skinned for the tastes of the time, also had no trouble gathering admirers. She was fun, this wild and tiny woman who could do anything, who smoked and sometimes went barefoot, who painted outdoors and from nude models, like a man.

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 (as Henry James, that connoisseur of rule-bending womanhood, later testified). They lived together in Paris and also saw each other in London, but Fanny did not imagine a future for them as a couple. Louis’s closest friends did not welcome her; they considered her uncouth and damaging to his growing reputation as a belletristic essayist and critic. His family was unhappy. Her family and Sam’s were fiercely opposed to a divorce: The scandal would affect their social standing along with hers. Finally, Fanny returned to Oakland and to Sam in 1878.

It took at least a week and usually more to cross the Atlantic by steamer, then another week to cross the United States by rail. A lovelorn year later, Louis came after her, and in doing so made a kind of existential leap, proving to himself as much as Fanny, by the epic nature of the journey, that he was not an effete young man of letters who had to negotiate his desires with his parents. He seems to have been one of those men for whom marrying an unsuitable woman is a defining act, a rejection of the life that others expect him to live.

He wanted to travel steerage to get the full emigrant experience, but had to upgrade to get a cabin in which he could write. He knew he would use the voyage as material for a book, eventually “From the Clyde to Sandy Hook,” the first half of his ambitious travelogue The Amateur Emigrant. The second half, “Across the Plains,” followed his journey from New Jersey to California on a cut-rate train utterly lacking in comfort. He had to rent a board with straw cushions to sleep on and chipped in with two other men for a bowl, a towel, and soap to wash with. By the time they could change to a better train for the last leg, the air in the crowded carriages was fetid.

The three-week odyssey from Glasgow to San Francisco was eye-opening, every bit as worth writing about as Louis had anticipated. Recording the despair and false hopes that brought so many emigrants from Europe to America was harder-hitting work, less geared to the picturesque and pleasing, than the travel writing he had previously done, such as Travels With a Donkey in the Cévennes. As Peri suggests, Fanny was already nudging him toward greatness as a writer by forcing him to live a bigger life than he had known before he met her.

By the time they were reunited in California, Louis was quite ill. When his coughing began to bring up blood, he and Fanny assumed he had tuberculosis, the only disease people then knew about that was associated with the symptom. Peri cites bronchiectasis, which affects the airways, as another possible diagnosis. Fanny threw respectability to the wind and moved him into her house to nurse him. She had already lost a child and was not going to lose her man.

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. She trained herself to be his personal physician; subscribed to the British medical journal The Lancet ; promoted bed rest and clean air, the two principal treatments for TB; and stocked palliative drugs for all contingencies. These included laudanum, that Victorian cure-all, to dull his pain; hashish or chloral hydrate (knockout drops) to make him sleep; and, to try to stop his hemorrhaging, the hallucinogen ergotin (derived, as LSD was later, from the ergot fungus, which helped constrict blood vessels). An early believer in germ theory, Fanny would rigorously protect her husband later in life from visitors with colds, irritating both him and would-be callers. Their life became not so much a search for health as a notably adventurous campaign to hold off death.

[From the October 1880 issue: A poem by 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. The fresh air and mineral springs near St. Helena were reputed to be healthy for consumptives, and staying rent-free in a ghost town appealed to Louis’s imagination. It was their first collaboration: Louis envisioned something, and Fanny made it happen. She turned a shack, overgrown with poison oak, into a livable space. She hammered furniture from crates, set up a kitchen, and managed to keep the family fed and healthy. Fanny created the experience. Louis created the account of it, The Silverado Squatters. This joint effort in the service of his health, his creative output, and their mutual pleasure set a pattern for their life together.

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. He seems to have been born a stylist, a writer whose sentences delight with their originality, grace, freedom, and bull’s-eye accuracy. However, the knowledge of human character that underlies his wild adventure tales, the kind of knowledge that Dickens acquired from childhood misery and his work as a reporter, Louis got from life with Fanny. Unlike his parents, Fanny wanted Louis to write, and unlike his London chums, who feared that his critical gift would wither in the cultural wastelands beyond London, she encouraged him to write fiction.

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. Now she collaborated with Louis on some stories, and became his first reader and an editor whose enthusiasm for his work was steady but whose criticism was fearlessly expressed.

Their life together led them back to Europe, to Switzerland, Scotland, the south of France, and England, before, famously, Samoa in the final years, always in search of relief from Louis’s physical ordeals, almost always short of money—with writing always in mind. Housebound in the Scottish Highlands because of incessant rain, Louis spent time playing with 13-year-old Lloyd, making up stories to go with Lloyd’s watercolor paintings, as he had sometimes made up stories inspired by flame-shapes in the fireplace. Louis annotated one painting, a map, with names such as Spyglass Hill, and it became the basis of a tale about a boy like Lloyd, who finds himself on a ship full of pirates. In 15 amazing days, Louis wrote the first 15 chapters of Treasure Island, reading them aloud in the evening to his little family and guests. His London friends predictably regretted his wasting himself on a children’s book, but the tap had been opened. Within three years, he published Treasure Island (Fanny told him bluntly—to no avail—that it sagged in the middle), Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (she convinced him that those characters should be two sides, good and evil, of the same person), Kidnapped, and A Child’s Garden of Verses.

Peri does not often venture into extended discussion of Louis’s literary work, but when she does, it can be fascinating; she ties, for example, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde to the couple’s rampant use of psychedelics. When Louis hemorrhaged, the drugs Fanny gave him sometimes rendered him close to insane. Louis often thought of himself as living with another person inside him, a creature he called Bloody Jack, who preyed on his weaknesses. Bloody Jack erupted unpredictably, like a volcano, spewing blood and racking coughs, fits that could go on for hours or days, draining his vitality. But the feverish thoughts that came with Bloody Jack could be strangely invigorating.

[From the November 1994 issue: The double life of Robert Louis Stevenson]

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. He would urge Fanny to go out into the world and come back with a tale to tell. She cleaned up his blood and carried him to the toilet. He allowed no one else to do it. If his hemorrhaging was worse than usual, she had to figure out why and how to stop it. “The feeling that my husband’s life depends upon my dexterity of hand and quickness of thought keeps me in a continual terror,” she wrote to Thomas Hardy’s wife, Emma. Louis’s friends thought Fanny a hysteric on the subject, always crying wolf.

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. Fanny never minded, although she was given to seasickness. As so often in her life, she was anomalous but useful, mending clothes, doctoring, and helping the all-male crew repair equipment. Settled eventually in Samoa, the Stevensons built a house and raised their own food. Between his hours of writing, Louis farmed alongside Fanny. Lloyd, as well as Belle and her husband and son, joined them. So did Louis’s now-widowed mother. Fanny continued her culinary experiments. Were the local ferns edible? Louis refused to try them without knowing. Fanny sampled them and was sick for a day. And so she learned.

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. 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. I like them so much that I hate reading of the times they disagreed, acted badly toward each other, even fought, but that is what married people do. I am grateful to Peri for telling the story of their marriage, in all its complexity, with sympathy and spirit. If only it were possible to tell a gender-bending story like this one without having to point out how gender-bending it is. If only, when Fanny rides a horse astride rather than sidesaddle, one did not have to add that she is “renegotiating concepts of womanhood and equality.”

Few writers have been painted with their wives. Only the portrait of Thomas and Jane Carlyle by Robert Tait, A Chelsea Interior, comes to mind. Jane Carlyle recorded how much they disliked sitting for the painting but little about what they thought of the finished piece, except that their dog looked too much like a sheep. But in 1885, John Singer Sargent, who had been a student of Carolus-Duran in Paris with Louis’s cousin Bob and so came to know the couple, painted them in the dining room of their house in Bournemouth. The portrait is suitably eccentric. Louis is painted in profile, full length, mid-stride, slightly hunched over, but turning to the viewer as though interrupted, stroking his mustache. This was typical behavior, apparently; caught up in conversation, he would walk, talk, and finger his mustache. At the extreme right, almost off the canvas, is a mass of highlights and glitter, which turns out, upon further study, to be Fanny, her face barely visible, sitting in a heavy old chair, barefoot and dressed in a sari with gold trim, an apparition in glitz. Louis liked the painting, in which he saw Sargent’s wit. Fanny described it to an artist friend as a “very insane, most charming picture.” To note that Fanny is marginalized would be tediously obvious. What makes the portrait so special is how Louis’s nervous energy is solidified and monumentalized, while Fanny’s solidity is dissolved into brushstrokes of dazzle. As Sargent understood and Peri proves, this couple requires an eye for dynamic disequilibrium.

This article appears in the September 2024 print edition with the headline “The Wild Adventures of Fanny Stevenson.”