The Wild Adventures of Fanny Stevenson

Her surprising marriage to Robert Louis Stevenson changed literary history.

- Phyllis Rose

When Fanny met Louis in 1876, he was not yet Robert Louis Stevenson, the author of Treasure Island, Kidnapped, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, A Child’s Garden of Verses. He was a scrawny, sickly, rotten-toothed, chain-smoking, 25-year-old literary wannabe who had published a few essays and reviews and was financially dependent on his parents, constantly squabbling with them over how— as they saw it— he was wasting his life, denying God, and generally going to hell in a handbasket. His parents were righteous Scots. He was a flaky bohemian. The men in his family were lighthouse engineers, and his father wanted Louis to continue the tradition. Louis hated engineering. He wanted to write. They compromised on law. His father dangled the equivalent of $145,000 if he passed the bar exam, which he did, but he never practiced, choosing instead to hang out with friends, mostly writers and artists far from the parental home in Edinburgh.

Fanny Vandegrift Osbourne was 36, 11 years older than Louis, an American, a wife, and a mother. Originally from Indiana, she had married at 17, quickly had a baby, and followed Sam Osbourne, her good looking and good-natured but feckless husband, to mining camps in the West, where he tried unsuccessfully to strike it rich. Her father gave her a pocket pistol when she left home. She kept it in her bag and learned to shoot a rifle as well. She was one of 60 “respectable” women in a city with 6,000 men. Building furniture, sewing curtains, chopping wood, hauling water, stoking fires, making soap, shooting rattlesnakes, and, of course, cooking, she made a home of their rough quarters.