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.
