Come Sail Away
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
What woman would ever be lured into marriage, so much more dangerous than the wildest sea?
—Robert Louis Stevenson, “Aes Triplex”
Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson threw caution to the wind after falling for a sharp-shooting American frontier woman and pursuing her across two continents. Their globe-trotting life together was as adventurous as his swashbuckling fictional tales, taking them from an abandoned California mining town to a voyage through the South Pacific.
When Robert Louis Stevenson received a telegram from Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne in July 1879, his response was decisive and dramatic. He set out from his native Scotland, bound for California, crossing an ocean and a continent to be with her. The contents of the mysterious missive were never revealed, thought to be either word that Fanny was finally divorcing her faithless husband or an attempt to break off her relationship with Stevenson. Either way, he wasted no time in reuniting with the object of his affections.
Legend has it that it was love at first sight when twenty-five-year-old Stevenson, then a fledgling writer, met Fanny at an artists’ colony in Grez-sur-Loing, France, three years before his transcontinental voyage. Respectable women were a rare sight in the traditionally male environment, and the married American caused a stir when she showed up. Taken with her good looks, intelligence, and outspokenness, the group of painters and writers quickly accepted Fanny into their midst, and she and her two children, eighteen-year-old Belle and eight-year-old Lloyd, were popular from the start.
The amiable, eccentric Stevenson also made a memorable impression when he appeared, vaulting through an open window at a hotel where the guests were dining and taking a seat next to Fanny. He swiftly fell “damnably in love,” but she was more interested in his cousin, Bob, an aspiring artist who, in turn, was infatuated with Belle. Charmed by Stevenson’s wit and silver tongue, it wasn’t long, though, before Fanny’s relationship with the “tall, gaunt Scotsman, with a face like Raphael” took a romantic turn.
Although Stevenson surprised some at Grez by pursuing Fanny, a decade his senior, instead of her teenage daughter, his infatuation with the married mother followed a familiar pattern. Prior to meeting her, he had been besotted with a beautiful friend of the family who was also ten years older. Stevenson later dedicated A Child’s Garden of Verses to another mature female figure who helped shape his childhood and adolescence, governess Alison Cunningham, whom he peculiarly referred to as “My second Mother, my first Wife.”
Fanny’s marriage was all but over by the time she met Stevenson. She had given her philandering husband, Sam, ample opportunities to change his ways during their nearly two-decade marriage. When his infidelity became excessively flagrant, she thumbed her nose at Victorian mores, leaving him behind while she headed to Europe with her children. After a stay in Antwerp, Belgium, the avid amateur painter and her daughter both enrolled in a Parisian art school. Tragedy followed when her youngest son, four-year-old Hervey, died of scrofulous tuberculosis, a painful illness that primarily affects the lymph nodes in the throat. Devastated, Fanny sought solace and a change of scenery in Grez.
Years earlier, while seventeen-year-old Fanny was embarking on marriage and motherhood, Stevenson lived a sheltered childhood in Edinburgh, where chronic illness frequently kept him housebound. An only child, he later rebelled against his middle-class upbringing, refusing to continue the family tradition of becoming a lighthouse engineer and denouncing his parents’ Calvinism. Dependent upon his father’s financial largesse for his survival, Stevenson consented to a fallback career in law but never practiced.
In contrast to Stevenson’s cloistered life, Fanny, who was born and raised in Indiana, led a rough-and-tumble existence after her marriage to the erratic Sam Osbourne, who often left her behind while he sought out adventure and get-rich-quick schemes. In remote Nevada mining camps, where her husband prospected for silver, she toted a gun and learned how to use it, rolled and smoked cigarettes, and made her own clothes. When her husband and his traveling party disappeared and were mistakenly presumed to have been killed by Indians, Fanny thought she was a widow and for two years supported her family by working as a seamstress.
When Stevenson first met Fanny, her colorful past inspired him to give her the nickname “Wild Woman of the West.” The feisty American embodied the adventurous spirit he later came to imbue in his novels, and her experiences, unlike those of the more proper women in his social circle, gave her “an atmosphere of thrilling New World romance” that irresistibly appealed to the writer.
After his “Wild Woman” left Europe and returned to America, the long-distance separation did nothing to diminish Stevenson’s passion. Her telegram a year later spurred him into action. Against the wishes of his parents, and ignoring the advice of friends, he set out for America. Not only did the lengthy journey by ship and rail take a serious toll on his already precarious health, but he arrived in the seaside town of Monterey, California, to a crushing blow. Despite a failed attempt at patching things up with her husband, Fanny was undecided about continuing her relationship with Stevenson.
It was only after he nearly died during a camping trip in the mountains outside Monterey, where he collapsed and was rescued by two ranchers, that Fanny changed her mind. She formally separated from Sam Osbourne, but out of consideration for him, and for Stevenson’s parents, the couple waited a respectable five months after the divorce was finalized before marrying. During that time, the writer’s parents and friends waged a relentless battle to persuade him to change his mind. But Stevenson stood firm, believing the delays and challenges he and Fanny had weathered only proved the strength of their relationship. “I am now engaged to be married to the woman whom I have loved for three years and a half,” he told to a friend. “At least I will boast myself so far; I do not think many wives are better loved than mine will be.”
The nuptials took place on May 19, 1880, after Fanny helped nurse Stevenson—who was ultimately diagnosed with tuberculosis—back to health. From the start, the couple’s life together was focused on his well-being; frequent and violent lung hemorrhages would often leave him spitting up blood and at death’s door. When the San Francisco fog proved damaging to his sensitive lungs, the newlyweds headed north to the Napa Valley. Strained finances forced them to abandon the hotel cottage they were renting, and instead they spent two months living in a ramshackle bunkhouse in Silverado, an abandoned mining town. After departing California, they roamed around Europe for several years, from Scotland and the coast of England to the Swiss Alps and the south of France, ever in search of a climate that would benefit the writer’s fragile health.
Stevenson’s parents, who initially opposed his marriage to a divorcée and foreigner, embraced their new daughter-in-law after the couple arrived in Scotland. His father in particular developed a close relationship with Fanny, and as a show of his affection he bought the couple a house and footed the bill for the interior design. Stevenson’s friends, however, were divided in their opinions of his wife. The writer Sidney Colvin described her as “a character as strong, as interesting, and romantic as his own; an inseparable sharer of all his thoughts, and staunch companion of all his adventures.” Others thought she was overbearing, selfish, and stifled Stevenson’s creativity. Protective of her husband’s health, Fanny refused to allow anyone with a cold—which, she noticed, her husband was particularly susceptible to contracting—to see him. Some acquaintances perceived this as a snub.
During their fourteen-year marriage, Stevenson—who had published two travelogues and an essay collection at the time they wed—produced his most memorable and enduring works, Treasure Island and Kidnapped among them. A staunch supporter of her husband’s writing, Fanny was often the first to read a novel or story in progress. The duo even collaborated on The Dynamiter, a collection of tales based on ones Fanny had spun to pass the time during a stay in the south of France. Before Stevenson’s father passed away, he extracted a promise from his son that he would never publish anything without Fanny’s approval.
Stevenson’s riveting psychological drama The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which set readers abuzz on both sides of the Atlantic, owed its success in large part to Fanny. After inspiration for the tale about the dark side of man’s dual nature came to Stevenson in a dream, he presented her with an early draft, along with the assertion that it was the best thing he had ever written. She thought it was the worst. “I wrote pages of criticism pointing out that he had here a great moral allegory that the dream was obscuring,” explained Fanny, who got into heated arguments with her husband over the tale. The original manuscript was consigned to the flames by Stevenson, it was believed, until a letter surfaced in 2000 in which Fanny alludes to having made the dramatic move to burn it.
When Stevenson returned to the United States in 1887, soon after Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde reached its shores, his reputation preceded him. The book’s publication had catapulted him to fame, and when the ship carrying the writer and his family docked in New York, he was besieged by reporters. After being feted by friends and fans, the couple headed for the Adirondack Mountains to seek out a doctor pioneering an open-air cure for tuberculosis. The bracing climate was a boon to Stevenson’s health, but the frigid winter temperatures got the adventurer thinking about a sojourn to the South Seas.
Less enamored of an itinerant lifestyle than Stevenson, Fanny nevertheless put her husband’s health first and made his dream of touring the South Pacific a reality. Ever resourceful, she found them a yacht to rent and arranged supplies. During the three years they sailed the high seas on several different voyages, she endured continual seasickness and occasional danger, including treacherous storms, a near-shipwreck, and an onboard fire, from which she bravely rescued a trunk of Stevenson’s manuscripts.
Enchanted with the South Pacific, the Stevensons settled on the Samoan island of Upolu, where they spent their final four years together. The idyllic setting agreed with the writer, who was generally in good physical form and in the midst of one of his most productive periods ever. However, it was Fanny’s health that gave the couple cause for concern as she began to suffer from breakdowns, refused to eat, and was seized by violent outbursts and hallucinations. Accounts vary widely as to what ailed her, among them the suggestion that she had Bright’s disease (a kidney ailment) or that she simply snapped after years of emotional strain brought on by her disastrous first marriage, the death of her youngest son, and the constant vigil she kept over her husband’s health.
Despite his anxiety about Fanny, Stevenson professed, “If I could die just now, or say in half a year, I should have had a splendid time of it on the whole.” Less than ten months later, he passed away from a cerebral hemorrhage. Among the outpouring of condolence letters the bereaved widow received was one from Henry James, a longtime friend of the couple. “You are nearest to the pain, because you were nearest to the joy and the pride,” the novelist consoled her.
Fanny thought to live out the rest of her life in Samoa, where she had strong memories of Stevenson, but circumstances forced her to relinquish their island retreat. After her death, her daughter brought her ashes back to Samoa, where they were interred alongside Stevenson’s in a hilltop grave overlooking the sea. Inscribed on her headstone is the concluding stanza from his poem “My Wife”:
Teacher, tender, comrade, wife,
A fellow-farer true through life,
Heart-whole and soul free
The august father
Gave to me.
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