A Wilder Shore: The Romantic Odyssey of Fanny and Robert Louis Stevenson by Camille Peri; Viking, 480 pp., $35
Most fans of Robert Louis Stevenson associate him with childhood readings of Treasure Island or Kidnapped, but I first encountered his work as an adult. I was traveling in the Cévennes, a range of mountains in southern France, researching the efforts of French Protestants to hide refugee Jews during the Second World War. Besides visiting sites tied to this moving history of resistance and resilience, I also took in an unrelated one that in an odd way celebrated those same qualities: le chemin de Stevenson. This was the trail the young Stevenson, accompanied by a difficult donkey named Modestine, rambled down in 1878 and made modestly famous in Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes, published the following year.
The book is an occasionally snarky, frequently funny, and at times surprisingly moving account of his interactions with the locals. Stevenson was as clumsy navigating the shoals of a society riven by political and religious differences as he was negotiating the steep and narrow paths with Modestine. Theirs was a turbulent relationship: he beat the poor beast at times but burst into tears after selling her at the end of his trek. “Her faults were those of her race and sex,” he concludes, “her virtues were her own.” But his real companion was not Modestine, I sensed, but someone else who never appears in the book. Or rather, who does so furtively. When Stevenson, near the end of his journey, hears a woman’s distant voice singing a love ballad, he authors a verse of his own: “How the world gives and takes away, and brings sweethearts near, only to separate them again into distant and strange lands.”
It is only now, thanks to Camille Peri’s A Wilder Shore, that I have come to know the identity of Stevenson’s unseen companion: Fanny Van de Grift, the woman he had left behind and with whom he would spend the rest of his short and eventful life. Born and raised in rural Indiana, Fanny married young to a charming philanderer named Sam Osbourne. Together, they tried, and failed, to strike it rich in the silver mines of Nevada. They had three children and settled in San Francisco, where Fanny played the role of dutiful mother while Sam frequented the more dubious parts of town. By 1875, she’d had enough. The couple separated, and Fanny sailed to Paris with her children. Resourceful and resilient, she scrambled to eke out an existence, a vie de bohème that ended sadly when scrofula took the life of her younger son, Hervey. With her two remaining children, Belle and Lloyd, the shattered mother fled 40 miles south to the artist colony of Grez-sur-Loing, famous for being the residence of John Singer Sargent.
There she met Stevenson. The only son of a distant father and a doting mother, he had defied their expectation that he become a respected barrister and instead pursued a writing career. The encounter between the pale and angular Scot and the olive-skinned, older American, wrapped in cigarette smoke, launched a relationship that, Peri persuasively contends, transformed the still-obscure Stevenson into one of the 19th century’s most famous writers. “Without Fanny,” Peri declares, “there would be no Robert Louis Stevenson as we know him.”
There have been many Stevenson biographies, ranging from Graham Balfour’s official version published in 1901 to the admirable account by Claire Harman a little more than a century later, and many, many scholarly studies. Over the years, more than a few of these have, at best, reduced Fanny to the role of helpmate or, at worst, dismissed her as a distraction. More recently, though, biographers have begun to reassess her life and work. Fanny wrote several short stories, essays, and a memoir and was her husband’s most trusted editor as well. Yet, as Peri writes, no biography “has captured the complex and dynamic woman she was or the passion, companionship, and creative energy that became the life force of the Stevensons’ marriage.”
Peri soars beyond those ambitious goals. In this compassionate but clear-eyed work, we discover Fanny’s bottomless curiosity about the world, one that spurred the couple across the European and North American continents, as well as to the South Pacific; her courageous refusal to accept the political, social, and gender norms of her time, an attitude that Robert admired and shared; and her critical role not as a mere assistant but as a creative equal in the growth of Stevenson as a writer.
This last role reveals itself not just in the stories that she contributed to their joint effort, More Arabian Nights: The Dynamiters, but also in the conception and shaping of some of Stevenson’s greatest works. In the case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Peri asserts that Fanny’s editorial suggestions were critical to the novel’s final form and immediate fame. (She also notes parenthetically—and please don’t say you already knew this—that Jekyll is pronounced “jee-kill.”)
Peri thus resists the still-powerful current of scholarship that holds Fanny’s interventions to have been a source of frustration for Stevenson. Critics seem to believe, Peri writes, that “crediting [Fanny] with literary insight would somehow diminish her husband’s genius.” Instead, Peri endorses Stevenson scholar Audrey Murfin’s insight that “ ‘far from resenting the intrusion of his wife’s voice and ideas,’ Louis welcomed ‘conflict and struggle into his work as a central part of his artistic practice.’ ” There is no better source for this assertion than Stevenson himself: “No one but myself knows,” he wrote to her, “what I have suffered, nor what my books have gained, by your unsleeping watchfulness and admirable pertinacity.”
And no one but Fanny knew just how difficult life was with Stevenson, who, when not engaging in fits of temper and coughing up inordinate amounts of blood, was churning out inordinate amounts of prose and poetry. Having unflinchingly assumed financial responsibility for Fanny, her children, and her grandchildren, Stevenson became, in his own words, “a slinger of ink.” It is astonishing to learn that in the last four years of his life—while living in Samoa and resembling, in Henry Adams’s wonderful phrase, an “insane stork”—he penned more than 700,000 words. And it is even more astonishing to be reminded of the shimmering quality and lasting influence of so many of those words. Just as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde revolutionized the horror genre, so Kidnapped recast the nature of adventure stories. (As for Treasure Island, I am convinced Marvel would never have found a treasure with Guardians of the Galaxy without it. The evolving bond between Jim Hawkins and Long John Silver anticipates the ties that bind Peter Quill and Yondu Udunta.)
For all of his success, Stevenson died before his genius could fully flower. While writing his last works in Samoa, he and Fanny witnessed firsthand the grim consequences of Western imperialism. The two works that spring from this experience, the short novel The Ebb-Tide and the short story “The Beach of Falseá,” anticipate not just Joseph Conrad’s early works but also the direction Stevenson’s writing might have taken had he not died so young. Fanny, for one, believed that her husband and companion was “very near the true beginning of his work.” Perhaps. But there is another work, no less significant, we should consider as well: the achievement of a life, made possible by the partnership of two extraordinary individuals, lived so well.
