She was, as Louis observed, ‘in no sense ordinary’. Her sister said that in their youth, Fanny’s initials were carved into just about every tree in the place. From a young age she had been allowed to roam freely on ranches in the Midwest where she toted a gun and rolled her own cigarettes. Ten years older than Louis, she was feminine but also comfortable with the opposite sex, one of the boys. ‘My cousin, Mr Stevenson,’ said Bob, and there ensued a grave inclination of heads, while I wriggled on my chair very much overcome and shyly stole peeps at the stranger.įanny was sensuous, self-assured and swarthy. He was borne to a chair was made to sit down in state, and still laughing and talking in the general hubbub was introduced to my mother and sister. The whole company rose in an uproar of delight, mobbing the newcomer with outstretched hands and cries of greeting. Then in the dusk of a summer’s day, as we all sat at dinner about the long table d’hote, some sixteen or eighteen people, of whom my mother and sister were the only women and I the only child, there was a startling sound at one of the open windows giving onto the street, and in vaulted a young man with a dusty knapsack on his back. Her philandering husband was back in America, and the little family had come to this artistic community to grieve and recover.įanny’s son Leon remembered Stevenson’s unusual entry into the room. She had originally come to France with her family, to study art with her seventeen-year-old daughter her young son Hervey had died shortly afterwards. Fanny was staying there with her daughter Belle and son Leon. They met in 1876 at an artists’ gathering at the Hotel Chevillon in Grez-sur-Loing, on the fringes of the Fontainebleau forest. The woman constantly on his mind was Fanny Osbourne. He must have thought about this a great deal when setting out on a journey through the French Cévennes, consumed as he was by pent up sexual longing of which he did not openly speak. In this respect he believed France to be the most civilised country in Europe, showing up a British outlook ‘blinkered by chaste puritanism and prejudice’.

His stepson Lloyd Osborne wrote that Louis was attracted to the French ‘universal indulgence towards all sexual problems – their clear-sighted toleration of everything affecting the relations of men and women’. The French attitude that considered art to be an essential part of ordinary life seemed more adult to him. And like many Scots, he had an affinity with France, feeling free and at home there. Well before he became known as a novelist, Robert Louis Stevenson was an essayist and travel writer.

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