Falling in Love with Fanny and Robert Louis Stevenson

Robert Louis Stevenson scholar Trenton B. Olsen reviews “A Wilder Shore” by Camille Peri.

By Trenton B. OlsenDecember 8, 2024

• Literary Criticism

• Biography & Autobiography

THE STORY OF Robert Louis Stevenson’s marriage to the American Frances “Fanny” Matilda Van de Grift Osbourne sounds like something out of a romance novel. One evening in September 1876, a 25-year-old Stevenson entered a sleepy medieval hamlet in the forests south of Paris to join his friends in an artists’ colony. The sickly author had come for good company, a favorable climate for pulmonary illness, and distance from the family home in Edinburgh. In a rare period of relative health, he traveled on foot with a rucksack, having just completed a series of walking tours and a canoe trip through Belgium and France.

Stevenson’s life course had been even more meandering. His devout Calvinist parents had expected their only child to settle into religious orthodoxy, professional stability in the family business of lighthouse engineering, and bourgeois respectability. Instead, the long-haired bohemian lost his faith, devoted himself to literature, and informed his mother he would “be a nomad, more or less, until my days are done.” By this time, Stevenson had begun to establish himself as one of the 19th century’s leading essayists, making his name in nonfiction a decade before the publication of his first novel, Treasure Island (1883).

One of his essays, “Virginibus Puerisque”—an allusion to Horace’s line “I sing to maids and boys” and the first piece in a four-part series on marriage—had appeared in The Cornhill Magazine a month earlier, and he had romance on his mind. He had developed a passionate, unrequited attachment to a cultured, older woman named Frances Sitwell. They met three years earlier, and he saw her as “some one to whom [he could] show [him]self.” His voluminous love letters to her—essayistic accounts of his life, reflections, and feelings—were often crammed with a week’s worth of daily entries. Sitwell retained his friendship while gently declining his advances. Stevenson’s frustration over his romantic failure comes through in the essay’s skepticism. Observing that most marriages are based only on a “lukewarm preference,” he argues that love is too violent a passion for a peaceful household just as a “lion is […] scarcely suitable for a domestic pet.” If less ardent unions made for tranquility, they also came at a price: the comfortable couple falls spiritually asleep and “undergoes a fatty degeneration of [their] moral being.” Still, rapturous affection had backfired in Stevenson’s life, and he sometimes wondered, as expressed in a letter the previous year, whether “a good dull marriage with a dull good girl would be a good move.”

Arriving at the artists’ colony after dark, his friends well into the night’s free-flowing wine and boisterous conversation, he decided to make a dramatic entrance through the window. But before vaulting into the room, Stevenson caught sight of Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne. Candles illuminated her dark eyes, brown curls, and olive skin. The combination of feminine, delicate features and masculine boldness flickered in her like firelight. A line from his subsequent fiction conveys the impression: “Her face startled him; it was a face he wanted; and he took it in at once like breathing.”

A month later, he was writing another essay, “On Falling in Love.” He’d been “startle[d] […] out of his prepared [and published] opinions,” and confessed that “falling in love is the one illogical adventure.” The pairing certainly seemed illogical: Fanny had grown up in the frontier town of Indianapolis and lived in the mining camps of Nevada and California—a world apart from Stevenson’s privileged Edinburgh upbringing. She never traveled without her revolver and must have seemed, to the genteel Scotsman, like a character in an adventure story. She was 10 years his senior, a mother with children, and, inconveniently, still married. She had come to France to study painting with her 16-year-old daughter and escape the humiliation of her husband’s open adultery. Stevenson was a young bachelor with family money; Fanny had just buried her five-year-old son in a French pauper’s grave. She was hardly the “dull good girl” for a prudent, conventional match.

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Twelve years later, in an anniversary letter to Fanny—now his wife—Stevenson commemorated this crucial moment “when [he] looked through the window.” He saw her glowing through candlelit glass and his life was never the same. In Camille Peri’s meticulously researched and vividly narrated dual biography, A Wilder Shore: The Romantic Odyssey of Fanny and Robert Louis Stevenson (2024)—“an intimate window into how they lived and loved”—Fanny comes into focus and finally gets her due.

Stevenson once described his wife as “always either loathed or slavishly adored; indifference impossible.” This polarity has been true of too many of her biographical portrayals, which, as Peri notes, tend to vacillate between extreme depictions of the angelic domestic nurse and the domineering drain on her husband. Peri reframes our view of this intriguing woman in an admiring but fair and nuanced portrait that is more compelling and reliable than either of these caricatures. Making use of recent scholarship, Peri views Fanny through a wider lens than previous biographers, studying her literary work to shed light on her life, influence on Stevenson, and place in Victorian popular magazine writing. Her thorough account of Fanny’s contribution to Stevenson’s career, from credited co-authorship and editorial influence to household management and lifesaving care, convincingly demonstrates that “without Fanny, there would be no Robert Louis Stevenson as we know him.”

A journalist by trade, Peri previously worked on the anthology Mothers Who Think: Tales of Real-life Parenthood (co-edited with Kate Moses, 1999), which takes its title from the Salon section she founded in 1997, and it’s evident from her perceptive insights on her subjects’ formative influences that she has thought deeply about family life. The isolation of childhood illness made Stevenson uncomfortable with girls his age and drew him to older women. His small allowance, meant to keep him out of trouble, ironically confined him to the bars and brothels of Edinburgh’s seedier areas. Peri is also attentive to the practical side of parenting. With children in tow, Fanny outran a historic flood on primitive roads and flimsy bridges en route to France. Such a journey is made harder by the apparatus of a bustle, safer by keeping a pistol in one’s purse, and simpler by knowing how and when to play the role of damsel in distress. From this gripping opening scene, Peri skillfully guides readers through what can be a dizzying litany of people and places in the Stevensons’ lives, humanizing the book’s large cast of characters and tracing the psychological and emotional currents of the couple’s constant travels.

Peri addresses a general audience—an important and worthy project, given the popular appeal of Stevenson’s work. There is, however, a tension between the public perception of Stevenson and the scholarly view of his work, which is most evident in Peri’s discussion of his essays. She characterizes his essay writing as a practical strategy: “the best way into a literary career” adopted on the advice of his friend, and later editor, Sidney Colvin. But Stevenson had been writing essays for five years before meeting Colvin, publishing six of them in Edinburgh University Magazine. Peri attributes his return to fiction—“the kind of writing he loved”—to Fanny’s encouragement, without which “Louis might now be a forgotten man of letters,” but this is probably overstated. “Sooner or later,” Stevenson mused, “somehow, anyhow, I was bound to write a novel.” Peri’s framing may give readers the impression that his essays can be dismissed as “slight articles”—a foot in the literary door opening the way for the real work of his novels—but such a view would be mistaken. When he met Fanny, Stevenson had written nearly 40 essays. He would go on to write over 80 more and publish several essay collections. His most prolific and profitable period of essay writing came after his famous novels and at the height of his fame in New York’s Adirondacks in 1887–88.

Stevenson took pains to differentiate his popular fiction and his work as a whole. His essay “My First Book—Treasure Island,” published just four months before his death in 1894, begins this way:

It was far indeed from being my first book, for I am not a novelist alone. But I am well aware that my paymaster, the Great Public, regards what else I have written with indifference, if not aversion; if it call upon me at all, it calls on me in the familiar and indelible character; and when I am asked to talk of my first book, no question in the world but what is meant is my first novel.

Following his superstar treatment in New York City as Thomas Russell Sullivan’s 1887 stage adaptation Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde had its Broadway premiere at Madison Square Theatre, Stevenson reflected, “Lord, what a silly thing is popularity!” Though grateful for success, he did not connect it with quality, saying that “good work sometimes hits […] by an accident,” and even worrying that “There must be something wrong in [him], or [he] would not be popular.” Stevenson has paid a steep, posthumous price for popularity: his vast and varied body of work has been reduced to its most narrow and familiar elements.

Stevenson believed “that good work must succeed at last; but that is not the doing of the public.” When literary critics assessed Stevenson’s career following his death, a different view emerged. They debated whether he would be best remembered for his fiction or his essays, with many believing that his “final fame will be that of an essayist.” Over time, historical fluctuations in the critical standing of both Stevenson and the genre led to the neglect of his personal essays, but this is changing. In 2012, the Journal of Stevenson Studies published an issue devoted exclusively to the essays, I recently edited The Complete Personal Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson (2021), and Edinburgh University Press’s volume Essays I: Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers (2018) offers the most thorough discussion of the essays to date. While no Stevenson expert would ever look past his novels, scholars of both Stevenson and nonfiction hold his essays in particularly high esteem. Peri presents his career in a way that literary critics and Stevenson himself have resisted, but she is clearly familiar with the entirety of his work, referencing a number of his essays, including relatively obscure ones, and making particularly good use of his memoirs.

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For two years after their meeting, Stevenson spent as much time with Fanny as he could, generally in intervals of a month or two in Paris or the artists’ colony in Grez-sur-Loing, before having to return to Edinburgh. Love at first sight notwithstanding, romance would have to give way to realism before their story could be realized. As Peri writes, “To the romantic Louis, propriety might mean little next to love, but Fanny had to be more practical.” A blackmailer had been sending Stevenson anonymous letters, threatening to expose their affair to Fanny’s husband. A quiet liaison in France was one thing, but the scandal of a divorce could estrange both from their families, ending any financial support, and could jeopardize Fanny’s custody over her two remaining children. In the face of these pressures, Fanny returned home to California in August 1878. Stevenson, deeply depressed by her departure and uncertain about their future, set off on a 120-mile hike through the Cévennes mountains in Southern France: the subject of his memoir Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes (1879), which he described to his cousin as mostly “protestations to [Fanny].” But the strain of the journey and endless frustrations with the stubborn donkey Modestine were not enough to take his mind off his lover, who was similarly dragging her feet 5,000 miles away. While hiking, he reflects, “How the world […] brings sweethearts near only to separate them again into distant and strange lands,” and muses in a flash of sudden serenity, “Perhaps some one was thinking of me in another country.” He had to content himself with such thoughts for a full year of agonizing doubt.

When Stevenson received a telegram from Fanny in August 1879, he crossed the globe in a grand romantic gesture worthy of a Hollywood rom-com, risking his life and economic security for a chance to be with her. He went against the pleadings of his friends and without his parents’ knowledge; he fully expected that chasing after a married woman would immediately end their financial support and lead to his ultimate disinheritance. Before meeting Fanny, he wrote that “marriage […] is not at all heroic,” but this journey to New York in steerage class, and to California on a cramped emigrant train, took real courage.

Stevenson’s hopes rose as the train descended the Sierra Nevada toward the Pacific, and his romanticized view of the place and the person who led him there merged: “My heart leaped at this [scene]. It was like meeting one’s wife.” In France, he had written that the Californian family came from the land of “Bret Harte’s stories” along with Western miners, cowboys, mountain men, and “all the dramatis personae of the new romance.” Approaching San Francisco, he was swept up by the “hope that moves ever westward […] toward the land of gold […] and our own happy futures.”

Stevenson’s immediate future would be much less happy than he’d hoped. He barely survived the journey, and by the time he arrived in Monterey, he looked like a man at death’s door. Fanny’s husband, Sam Osbourne, was back in town, and it seemed that their marriage might outlive her ailing, penniless suitor. To give Fanny space and himself solace, Stevenson again retreated into the wilderness, writing to a friend, “I know nothing, I go out camping [with] a broken heart.” Sick and exhausted, overexposed and undersupplied, his heart nearly gave out as he collapsed by a goat ranch, where he was taken in and cared for.

Stevenson stayed in Monterey and later San Francisco while Fanny, separated from Osbourne, lived in Oakland: an arrangement that allowed them to keep up appearances but also doubled their expenses. Fanny’s husband generally spent his income on prostitutes, mistresses, and “anybody’s family but his own.” What had been inconsistent financial support from him would soon dry up completely. The skeletal Stevenson wrote feverishly to earn money for Fanny’s family, including her sister and son in boarding school, and reduced his personal food budget to 70 cents a day: enough for one full meal at lunch and a buttered roll with coffee for breakfast and dinner.

Stevenson felt that he had “dared everything” in coming; within three months, Fanny did the same. She divorced her husband, and when Stevenson’s health declined again, she abandoned propriety and openly took him into her home to nurse him. As Peri writes, “It was a brash, reckless, and courageous thing to do, and it very likely saved his life.” The couple married five months after the divorce, in May 1880. Fanny was now 40; Stevenson was approaching 30 and still dangerously ill. It seemed that he would spend most of his married life in sickness rather than health and that “as long as they both [should] live” might not be long at all.

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Three months after their wedding, the couple returned to Europe, bouncing between Scotland, Switzerland, and France for four years before settling in Bournemouth, England. During the three years that followed, Stevenson was too sick to leave the house and wrote Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, A Child’s Garden of Verses, and Kidnapped. Even in their relatively egalitarian marriage, Fanny struggled to establish her own identity and sometimes felt like hired help. In her account of these years, Peri brings a compassionate, modern understanding of the strains of caring for a chronically ill spouse: “In the Stevensons’ marital arrangement,” she writes, “Louis’s health came first, his work second, and Fanny’s needs last.” These pressures, along with her own health struggles, could make Fanny “grumpy and irritable” even as Stevenson sometimes directed his own frustrations with his invalidism at her. Peri also registers how Fanny’s trauma and guilt from her son’s death colored her care for Stevenson. At that time, Fanny wrote to a friend: “The feeling that my husband’s life depends upon my dexterity of hand and quickness of thought keeps me in a continual terror. So far, all has gone well, but the next time?” Fanny took the rare step of subscribing to a medical journal and had to be extra vigilant during an influenza epidemic, sometimes subjecting her husband’s visitors to handkerchief-examination health screenings. “In keeping him alive,” her son Lloyd remembered, “she necessarily offended many people.”

Guarding her husband’s health didn’t help Fanny’s relationship with some of his closest friends, who opposed the match from the beginning and never warmed to her. They talked, laughed, drank, and smoked late into the night; after 10:00, Fanny would “begin to hate them,” as she vented in a letter, and, presumably at an even later hour, was “thirsting for their life’s blood.”

The animosity of Stevenson’s friends toward his wife went beyond seeing her as a wet blanket on their boys’ club revelry. As Peri illustrates, Victorian gender ideology left no place for this brash, American divorcée who nursed her own personal ambitions as well as her sickly husband. She had a big personality and a fierce temper. She rolled her own cigarettes and was good with guns. Her olive complexion, in contrast to the fair-skinned beauty standard of the time, Peri stresses, was the frequent subject of racialized disparagement in Stevenson’s circle. Perhaps most objectionably, she had no problem criticizing her husband’s conduct and writing. When one doctor insisted that to prevent lung hemorrhages, Stevenson “must never be contradicted,” Fanny remarked dryly to her mother-in-law, “[That] will give me some training, will it not?” After Fanny reviewed the first draft of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Stevenson burned the manuscript and started over.

As Peri notes, many of Stevenson’s biographers later adopted his friends’ negative view, characterizing Fanny as “a greedy woman who ruined Louis’s friendships, destroyed and suppressed his work, and forced him into respectability.” Some have gone as far as suggesting that Fanny’s materialism caused Stevenson to work himself to death. Peri contextualizes these attacks: “Literary wives are very often maligned as unaccomplished, manipulative, and emasculating women who were detrimental to their famous husbands’ careers.” She convincingly places Fanny in a grim line of historically scapegoated authors’ wives, including Véra Nabokov, Sophia Tolstaya, Frieda Lawrence, and Olivia Langdon Clemens, whose famous husbands depended on them to function. Because Stevenson’s close friends were influential figures in the literary establishment long after his death, personal animus became critical consensus.

In his essay “On Falling in Love,” Stevenson notes that the lover’s friends “look on in stupor, and ask each other […] what so-and-so can see in that woman.” His own friends wrote letters to each other along these lines, with one complaining that she did not have “anything in her of my wife, or yours.” They couldn’t appreciate that Stevenson didn’t want a conventional marriage to a refined, compliant lady. He rejected the idealized Victorian expectation of “an angel for a wife” and embraced the reality “that she [was] like himself—erring, thoughtless, and untrue; but like himself also, filled with a struggling radiancy of better things, and adorned with ineffective qualities.” As Peri notes, persistent vilification of Fanny implicitly casts Stevenson as a weak-willed “lifelong adolescent who was cowed by his wife,” but in a letter to his parents that could have been addressed to his friends, he wrote, “[Fanny] has taken it into her head […] that you think that she is bad for me!” He told them, “What she is to me, no language can describe” and dismissed the criticism as “fair neither to Fanny nor to me.” Four years into his marriage, he wrote to his mother that he would not trade his wife for “a goddess or a saint.”

The building tensions between Fanny and her husband’s inner circle exploded in the spring of 1888 when his closest friend, William Ernest Henley, accused Fanny of plagiarism. Henley, a poet, editor, and absolute force of nature, had a leg amputated due to tuberculosis of the bone. He had been Stevenson’s intimate friend since their shared editor Leslie Stephen, father of Virginia Woolf, introduced them in 1875 at Edinburgh’s Royal Infirmary, where Henley spent three years to save his remaining leg from amputation. While there, Henley wrote his famous poem “Invictus”: “I am the master of my fate, / I am the captain of my soul.” With his wooden leg, “maimed strength[,] and masterfulness,” Henley was the model for Stevenson’s Long John Silver in Treasure Island. The substance of the plagiarism charge is a mess of misunderstanding, which Peri thoughtfully unravels, but the result was that Stevenson’s relationships with his best friend and close cousins were irreparably broken, along with a part of himself.

Seven years earlier, ironically, Stevenson had dedicated his published collection Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers, which includes the marriage essays, to Henley, writing, “I hope that our sympathy, founded on the love of our art, and nourished by mutual assistance, shall survive […] and, with God’s help, unite us to the end.” But certain passages in the first essay, written just before Stevenson met Fanny, almost seem to forecast that this was not to be: “The friendships of men are vastly agreeable, but they are insecure. You know all the time that one friend will marry and put you to the door.” The “very flexibility and ease” that render male friendships pleasant also “make them the easier to destroy.” Ultimately, it was Henley’s antipathy toward Fanny that shattered his relationship with Stevenson. Beyond gendered and cultural prejudice, this animosity grew out of rival affection. When Stevenson went to California for Fanny, Henley fretted, “If it come to the worst […] we shall lose the best friend a man ever had.” He was genuinely and justifiably worried that Stevenson wouldn’t survive the journey. What’s more, Henley believed that Fanny was bad for his friend’s health, character, and career. But there was a possessiveness in his attachment to Stevenson that caused him to experience their marriage as a kind of betrayal—he lost his role as Stevenson’s closest friend, key collaborator, and chief critic. “Jealousy,” as Stevenson wrote, “is one of the consequences of love.” Henley’s jealousy endured after Stevenson’s death. In response to a sanitized biography, written by the author’s cousin Graham Balfour and overseen by Fanny, he raged against his former friend in a biting review that did real damage to Stevenson’s literary legacy.

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When the break with Henley occurred in 1888, Stevenson was living in a cottage in Saranac Lake, New York. From there, he planned an audacious Pacific voyage. As usual, he dreamed up their next move and Fanny made it happen, booking and stocking a yacht in San Francisco for their greatest adventure. But in a place romanticized as paradise, they experienced the low point of their marriage. In Samoa, about a year and a half before Stevenson’s death, Fanny suffered a psychotic breakdown, temporarily losing her grip on reality, and their roles of patient and caregiver reversed. Far from regretting his marriage in this taxing and terrifying period, Stevenson wrote, “[A]s I look back, I think it was the best move I ever made in my life. Not only would I do it again; I cannot conceive the idea of not doing it.” Peri writes, “[E]ven in their worst times, the couple seemed to prefer being unhappy together to being happy apart because they were bonded by deep love and need.”

Stevenson retained this attitude about his marriage to the end. His final essay in the “Virginibus Puerisque” grouping, written a few months after their wedding and placed second in the series, combines his pre-Fanny realism and post-Fanny romance. To help Stevenson’s lungs and pocketbook, the couple honeymooned in an empty bunkhouse in an abandoned mining camp above Napa Valley, as he recounts in his memoir The Silverado Squatters (1883). Making a once-promising but now-deserted mining camp into a honeymoon suite aptly fit Stevenson’s philosophy of marriage. He writes that while the “natural and inviting” prospect of marriage seems to promise “great simplicity and ease,” it invariably means hurting the person you care for most, as one’s spouse becomes not only their advocate but also the witness, victim, and judge of all their shortcomings in a sort of matrimonial trial. The gap between naively high hopes and difficult, sometimes painful reality led Stevenson to one of his less romantic observations: “[T]here is probably no other act in a man’s life so hot-headed and foolhardy as this one of marriage.” Fittingly, they were married in San Francisco, which Stevenson called the “city of gold” and compared to El Dorado. His essay of that title on inaccessible, illusory goals, and destinations ends with the line “[T]o travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive.” On the journey of marriage, he writes,

When you have married your wife, you would think you were got upon a hilltop, and might begin to go downward by an easy slope. But you have only ended courting to begin marriage. Falling in love and winning love are often difficult tasks […] but to keep in love [requires] kindness and goodwill.

The supposedly easy descent mirrors the moment Stevenson coasted down the mountain tracks toward marriage in “the land of […] our own happy futures.” In an age when the happily-ever-after marriage plot still dominated the novel form, Stevenson the essayist wrote that “the true love story commences at the altar,” celebrating marriage as a realistic journey rather than a romanticized destination.

Stevenson wrote that marriage “is a field of battle, and not a bed of roses,” and he and Fanny certainly had their share of skirmishes. One marital argument recounted to Henry James in a letter left “two dead combatants upon the field, each slain by an arrow of truth, and we tenderly carried off each other’s corpses.” The strife was necessary for Stevenson, who believed “the spice of life is battle; the friendliest relations are still a kind of contest.” They fought with and for each other, but in comparing marriage to warfare, Stevenson meant something else. For him, “the man who should hold back from marriage is in the same case with him who runs away from battle,” because Stevenson saw both as a moral test—“an occasion for our virtues.” The real fight that “lies before the married pair [is] a most beautiful contest of wisdom and generosity, and a life-long struggle towards an unattainable ideal.” Characteristically for Stevenson, the problem becomes the point, and he elevates marriage not in spite of its inevitable failure but because of it. The partnership revealed in A Wilder Shore that “stimulated, frustrated, and ultimately sustained them” is the kind of marriage Stevenson wanted: “one long conversation, chequered by disputes” whereby “two persons […] conduct each other into new worlds of thought.”

For all her clear-eyed rigor, Peri writes with a palpable affection for her subjects, divulging that she “longed to step into one of the Stevensons’ homes” during her research. Stevenson has always had this personal effect on readers. The Times’ 1894 obituary laments the loss of “not only a great writer” but also “a personality of the most delightful, the most lovable kind,” found “chiefly […] in the Poems and in the Essays.” In a sense, the intimate connection between the reader and essayist—which depends on openness and charm, generosity and self-revelation—parallels the romantic relationship. In both literature and love, Stevenson explains, for both the writer and the men who “spea[k] their autobiography daily to their wives,” there is no “more difficult piece of art [than] explaining [their] own character to others.” To fully understand the Stevensons’ marriage, we would need more access to its “long conversation” than the historical record provides, but A Wilder Shore is an illuminating new window through which we will view the couple for years to come.

The ultimate realist Henry James—Stevenson’s close friend, sparring partner, and frequent visitor to their Bournemouth home—wrote of the couple on their departure for the wilder shores of the Pacific, “They are a romantic lot—& I delight in them.” Thanks to Peri’s wonderful book, readers will delight in them too, and may well fall in love.