Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny Van de Grift should never have been together, but as Camille Peri writes in “A Wilder Shore: The Romantic Odyssey of Fanny and Robert Louis Stevenson” (Viking), their “unlikely Victorian love story” somehow worked.
The contrast in their backgrounds was marked.
Stevenson was from a wealthy Scottish family and had recently passed the bar to keep his parents happy as he pursued a writing career that saw him pen classics such as “Treasure Island” and “The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.”
Van de Grift, meanwhile, hailed from a mining family in Indiana and, after years of suffering a philandering husband, had taken her children and fled to France where, in 1876, she met Stevenson at an artist’s retreat.
As Peri writes, Fanny’s personality was “as big as the American frontier, with a blend of female sensuality and masculine swagger.”
Stevenson was smitten. “For Louis, Fanny was the woman of a bad boy’s dreams – a fellow outsider, rebel, and adventurer, with whom he could truly be himself.”
But Stevenson had been ill since childhood with chronic respiratory complaints and episodes of pulmonary hemorrhage, his condition compounded by his fondness for opium, cocaine, drinking and chain-smoking.
As Peri notes, Stevenson once remarked he smoked “cigarettes without intermission except when coughing or kissing”.
Indeed, when he married Fanny in San Francisco in 1880, he described himself as “a mere complication of cough and bones, much fitter for an emblem of mortality than a bridegroom.”
Concerned by his ailing health, Fanny took Louis around the world to find help. She would ferry him up mountains to breathe cleaner air only for Stevenson to light another cigarette at the summit.
In 1889 they settled on the Pacific island of Samoa, building their house on a 300-acre plot. Five years later, on Dec. 3, 1894, Stevenson died after a stroke, aged 44.
Days before, Stevenson had suspected he was dying. “I have lost the path that makes it easy and natural for you to descend the hill,” he said.
“I am going at it straight. And where I have to go down is a precipice.”
