Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny Van de Grift were never meant to be 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 clear.
Stevenson came from a wealthy Scottish family and had recently passed the bar exam to keep his parents happy while he pursued a career as a writer, writing classics such as Treasure Island and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
Van de Grift, on the other hand, came from a mining family in Indiana and, after suffering for years under her unfaithful husband, fled with her children to France, where she met Stevenson in an artist’s residence in 1876.
As Peri writes, Fanny’s personality was “as big as the American frontier, with a mixture of feminine sensuality and masculine pride.”
Stevenson was blown away. “For Louis, Fanny was the woman a bad boy dreamed of – an outsider, a rebel and an adventurer with whom he could be himself.”
But Stevenson suffered from chronic respiratory problems and pulmonary hemorrhages since childhood. His condition was made worse by his penchant for opium and cocaine, his alcohol consumption and his chain smoking.
As Peri notes, Stevenson once said he smoked “cigarettes nonstop, except when coughing or kissing.”
When he married Fanny in San Francisco in 1880, he described himself as “a mere complication of cough and bone, much better suited as an emblem of mortality than as a bridegroom.”
Concerned about his ill health, Fanny travelled the world to find help, transporting him to mountains so he could breathe cleaner air, only for Stevenson to light another cigarette at the summit.
In 1889 they settled on the Pacific island of Samoa and built their house on a 300-hectare plot of land. Five years later, on December 3, 1894, Stevenson died at the age of 44 from the effects of a stroke.
Days earlier, Stevenson had thought he was dying. “I have lost the path that makes it easy and natural to descend the hill,” he said.
“I’m going straight to the point. And I have to go into the abyss.”
