Author Robert Louis Stevenson in a portrait with the women who were instrumental in helping him advance his literary career despite recurring illnesses. From left: wife Fanny Stevenson, stepdaughter and literary assistant Isobel Osbourne, and his mother, Margaret Isabella Stevenson.
Editor’s note: In 1879, the twentysomething Robert Louis Stevenson embarked on a transatlantic journey in pursuit of Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne, an eccentric Californian with whom he had fallen in love while visiting an artists’ colony in France. Stevenson arrived in the Golden State sick and in dire need of rest and recuperation. Osbourne helped nurse him back to health and became his wife. With her encouragement and contributions, Stevenson went on to write his classic works Treasure Island and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
For a romantic, Louis was grimly honest when he later described his wedding day, May 19, 1880, to a friend:
It was not my bliss that I was interested in when I was married; it was a sort of marriage in extremis; and if I am where I am, it is thanks to the care of that lady who married me when I was a mere complication of cough and bones, much fitter for an emblem of mortality than a bridegroom.
To save money, the couple took a cable car instead of a hansom cab from the Ferry House up Nob Hill to the Williams home. Virgil [their friend] was out of town, but Dora [his wife] walked with them from there to the home of Reverend William Anderson Scott. They must have seemed an odd couple to him: the stick-thin boy-man, his face ghostly but for his burning brown eyes, and the dark woman with equally piercing eyes and a graying mane of curls, who came up no higher than his heart. The couple fudged the facts they gave Scott for the marriage record. Fanny was boldly honest about her age, forty, but shamelessly declared herself a widow. Louis claimed to be thirty years old, narrowing the age gap between them by a year. With Dora acting as both best man and bridesmaid, they exchanged vows and plain silver rings. Then the threesome went to a Viennese bakery for a “grand blow out of ices.”
This excerpt appears in Issue 28 of Alta Journal.
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Fanny and Louis were now officially respectable. And they spent their wedding night at the appropriately fashionable Palace Hotel, the largest and grandest hotel in the western United States. They arrived by carriage, stepping down under the spectacular soaring glass roof onto the marble-tiled promenade. They strolled along the balustraded balconies overlooking the courtyard, the place to see and be seen in San Francisco. Anyone might think that they had left their odd, bohemian ways behind. But it was the last luxury they would enjoy for a while. A few days later, pockets drained, they left for their eccentric honeymoon. They would spend it squatting on an abandoned silver mine.
Fanny, Louis, Lloyd [Fanny’s son by her previous marriage], and Chuchu, their dog, headed to the Napa Valley, where a number of consumptives had fled for the supposed healing powers of the fresh air and spring water on Mount St. Helena. Hearing of an abandoned mining camp up the mountain where they might stay rent free, they managed the steep, stony ascent in a double buggy until they had to climb a wooden ladder mounted on the hillside to get to their future lodgings.
The Silverado Mine had been bored into the earth just eight years earlier. But the venture went bust without ever managing to boom, short-circuiting starry-eyed plans for a prosperous city with street names like Ruby, Gold, and Garnet. On a triangular platform covered with rubble, three wooden sheds were wedged up the canyon wall like steps under an overhang of red rock. The first building had been the assayer’s office. Now a single door panel, smashed and splintered, twisted there in the breeze. Branches of bay leaves clambered in through the empty window frames and a spray of poison oak was thriving through a hole in the floor. The second and third sheds contained three-tiered miners’ bunks—eighteen beds in all—and more litter. For the duration of their stay, the honeymooners, and Lloyd, would need to walk outside and climb a plank to an open doorway suspended in midair to get to their shared bedroom.
With scraps of lumber and iron strewn around the buildings, the place was a dump, literally. In his memoir of the experience, The Silverado Squatters, Louis would admit that his vision of a mining ghost town had been a bit more romantic—“a clique of neighbourly houses on a village green, we shall say, all empty to be sure, but swept and varnished; a trout stream brawling by; great elms or chestnuts, humming with bees and nested in by song-birds.”
A veteran of slapdash silver mining camps, Fanny’s expectations were more grounded. After Louis ceremoniously cut away the poison oak growing through the floor, she took over. She made doors and windows out of light frames and cotton, using leather from discarded boots for door hinges. Out of scraps of wood and packing crates, she nailed together furniture. The mouth of the mine became her cooler for dried peaches, wine, and the fresh milk she had brought up the mountain daily. She hung pigeons, wild ducks, and other game bought from local hunters there. A stove and hay for the bunks were also hauled up the mountain.
When it was livable—“the beds made, the plates on the rack, the pail of bright water behind the door, the stove crackling in a corner”—Louis called it a fine example of “man’s order, the little clean spots that he creates to dwell in.” But it was a woman’s ingenuity that created this “little clean spot.” Louis was what the Scots call a “handless” man. When he wrote, “We had repaired the worst of the damages,” we can assume it was Fanny who wielded the hammer and saw. This was to become the way they worked together. Whenever the irrepressible Louis felt an urge to move—for his health, to follow a dream, or out of simple boredom—Fanny made it happen. In this case, her imagination transformed an abandoned mine into a homey lodging; his imagination infused it with a mythic quality in The Silverado Squatters.
In their private castle in the air, Fanny and Louis could play with the strict gender roles of their day. Fanny, on her knees as she pounded a nail into place, might look up to see Louis lounging in the sunlight, draped in her shawl and wearing her mushroom hat backward with the feather drooping over his nose. Though her handyman skills gave Fanny an unusual domestic stature, this was not always to her benefit as a creative person. Louis’s writing talent gave him the loftiest role in their family. But he wore his crown with ease and style, never imposing his domestic authority in a heavy-handed or entitled manner.
Fanny appreciated that Louis was not a typical husband, bellowing orders and expecting them to be instantly obeyed. She noticed his lax sense of authority early in their marriage, even in his whimsical relations with the family dog. In a letter to Dora, almost her only correspondence to survive from this period, Fanny described how Louis fruitlessly scolded Chuchu when the pooch scattered his slippers everywhere: “The difference between Louis’ severity of discipline in theory, and shameless indulgence in practice in regard to Chuchu’s education is amusing. Let us hope it will be the same with his wife.”
Louis had been unnerved by the specter of earthquakes in San Francisco, but in Silverado he and his new family were truly living on shifting ground. They could hardly walk outside without sinking and sliding or tearing their shoes on the sharp rocks. Tunnels and mine shafts wound through the ground under them. At any moment, their makeshift quarters could collapse into a shaft or give way and carry them tumbling down the hill. At night, the yowls of coyotes and foxes sounded ominously close through the cracks in the walls and cloth doors. During the day, rattlesnakes whirred “like spinning wheels” on every side. But for two months, Fanny could give Louis the rest he had been longing for.
After a few morning chores, Louis was free to rest, wander, and write. Apparently, his recuperation did not forbid cigarettes, even as he had to be hauled halfway up a mountain to breathe crystal pure mountain air. Drinking alcohol was also routine. Fanny served frothy rum punch, sprinkled with cinnamon, midmorning and midafternoon every day. And at Schramsberg Winery, he tasted eighteen wines in one sitting—an impressive feat even for a man in robust health.…
After nearly two months, the squatters abandoned their perch, before the seasonal wet evening fog began settling into gullies and mountain crevices and Louis’s lungs. His health was strong enough for an ocean voyage, and he longed to see Scotland and his parents. With Fanny’s help, his relations with them were improving.•
Excerpted from A Wilder Shore: The Romantic Odyssey of Fanny and Robert Louis Stevenson, by Camille Peri, to be published on August 13, 2024, by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2024 by Camille Peri.
A WILDER SHORE: THE ROMANTIC ODYSSEY OF FANNY AND ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON, BY CAMILLE PERI
Camille Peri is an author and journalist who founded the website Mothers Who Think, part of the online publication Salon. She coedited Mothers Who Think: Tales of Real-Life Parenthood and Because I Said So: 33 Mothers Write About Children, Sex, Men, Aging, Faith, Race & Themselves, which received an American Book Award.
