It is well known that the inspiration for Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 gothic novella, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, came to the Scottish author in a dream. Less familiar is the part that his American wife, Fanny Stevenson (née Van de Grift), played in juicing up the story’s plot to establish Edward Hyde’s wickedness early on. According to Camille Peri’s riveting biography, A Wilder Shore: The Romantic Odyssey of Fanny and Robert Louis Stevenson, it was Fanny’s idea to have Hyde trample a little girl, leaving her to die without a backward glance.
Peri suggests that a tendency has grown to diminish Fanny’s contributions to her husband’s work, similar to other literary wives such as Vera Nabokov, Sofia Tolstaya, and Frieda Lawrence, whose creative input has also been largely downplayed. A dual biography can work only if both personalities depicted are equally fascinating. This is certainly the case here, as Peri convincingly argues that without Fanny, who was 10 years Stevenson’s senior and married with children when they met, there would have been no Robert Louis Stevenson as we know him.
It was September 1876 when the couple first locked eyes on each other, in the bucolic setting of Grez-sur-Loing, in north-central France. Both had traveled to the burgeoning artists’ colony to escape their stifling bourgeois lives. Fanny Osbourne, as she was then known, had abandoned her feckless husband, Samuel, in the United States and was traveling with her 17-year-old daughter, Belle, and her 8-year-old son, Lloyd. She was mourning her youngest son, Hervey, who had recently died of tuberculosis. Louis, who had gone on a canoe trip on the Loing with a friend, was a budding essay writer of increasingly fragile health.
“The river was an apt metaphor for Louis’s life at that time,” Peri writes of the then 26-year-old. “Before he met Fanny Osbourne, he was floating, as he once wrote, like ‘a leaf on a river with no volition and no aim.’ With her, he would become one of the most famous writers in the world.”
Though Fanny stood just under five feet tall, she was a magnetic presence, with her olive-colored skin and penetrating eyes, which Louis would later describe as “insane.” She carried a small gun in her purse to protect herself and her children, chopped wood, and rolled her own cigarettes. She was also an established magazine writer and a decent painter. By contrast, Louis’s physical appearance was less than scintillating, with Peri describing him as “a sliver of a man, with straggly hair, bad teeth and eyes set too far apart.”
Fanny carried a small gun in her purse to protect herself and her children, chopped wood, and rolled her own cigarettes.
However, it was Louis’s mind, not his looks, that captivated Fanny, his mastery of words, and his extraordinary gifts as a storyteller. This last quality was something that needed to be sparked into life by Fanny, who encouraged Louis to abandon “safely picturesque” essay writing for fiction. Peri suggests that Fanny was “the only person close to Louis who encouraged him to trust his instincts as a fiction writer,” which meant writing the sort of unpretentious adventure stories that appealed to young and old alike, notably Treasure Island (1883) and Kidnapped (1886).
In A Wilder Shore, Peri examines Fanny’s rough treatment by Stevenson’s coterie of Scottish male friends after the couple’s marriage, in 1880. “Much as Yoko Ono would be blamed for the Beatles’ breakup nearly a century later, Fanny would be seen as ruining the boys’ club, the circle of men who compete even with her for prominence in Louis’s life—an awkward situation that the beloved man in the center would do little to assuage.”
Part of this ill-warranted reputation as a “difficult” woman appears to have been a result of Louis’s ever precarious health, which often left him bedridden for weeks at a time. There was so much that ailed him, including coughing attacks, which brought on internal bleeding, that Fanny often found it necessary to keep Louis’s friends at a safe distance. In describing herself as a “buffer,” Fanny seems to have suffered just as much from this situation as anyone else. “A buffer’s life is a wearisome one,” she wrote. “I can get no time for anything, to write, to think, to be conscious of my own identity.”
In spite of these and other travails, the couple remained touchingly devoted to each other, sharing a common “wanderlust” that gave their lives a continual sense of renewal and hope. The last part of A Wilder Shore is devoted to their final years together, on the island of Upolu, in Samoa, where they purchased a 315-acre plot and built a magnificent house that they christened “Vailima,” which is now the site of the Robert Louis Stevenson Museum. Visitors might be informed that it was just as much Fanny’s home, and that out of her efforts grew modern Samoa’s premier botanical gardens.
Tobias Grey is a Gloucestershire, U.K.–based writer and critic, focused on art, film, and books
