A marriage of radical minds: the creative partnership of Fanny and Robert Louis Stevenson

It is hard to imagine any Victorian man living a fuller life in a flimsier body than Robert Louis Stevenson – and he certainly wouldn’t have managed it without the support of his partner and wife of several decades, Fanny Van de Grift. Born in Edinburgh on 13 November 1850, Louis suffered from countless childhood illnesses that limited his activity to reading books, writing stories and staging ‘pasteboard theatre’ productions with his nanny, or else travelling to health spas in Marseille, Genoa and Naples. He strongly resisted his father’s efforts to enlist him in his own career as a lighthouse designer, and at Edinburgh University the only thing he excelled at was truancy. Years later, when he applied for a teaching position, one of his former professors was unable to write a testimonial since he couldn’t recall ever having seen him in class. Instead, he spent his days writing, and, according to Camille Peri, associating with ‘seamen, chimney sweeps, thieves and “threepenny whores”’. As his lifelong friend Sidney Colvin recalled, Louis was ‘beset by fleshly frailties’ as well as by medical ones.

Meanwhile, Fanny (born in 1840) was spending an equally errant but far more robust early life in America – sounding at times like an impossible blend of Annie Oakley and Henry James’s Isabel Archer. As a young woman, she carried a gun and knew how to use it. Brought up in a frontier town, she was the opposite of Louis in many ways – tomboyish, adventurous and sporty. She got married, young, to a scoundrel, who would soon ‘borrow’ the furniture from their homes to give to his mistresses. She ran off from him (almost as often as he ran off from her), working as a seamstress in San Francisco, raising her two children in a silver-mining town in Nevada, writing essays and stories for magazines and eventually escaping abroad on a whim to study art with her daughter at the Académie Julian in Paris.