A ‘Clinging Vine’ Who Flourished as Vigorously as Any Stately Oak

“My life,” Fanny Stevenson once said, “resembles a wild ride on the crest of a wave that rolls and never breaks.”

Born in Indiana in 1841, she followed her first husband to the gold fields of Nevada when she was 23, ran away to France to study art with three young children in tow, fell in love with a gaunt young Scotsman named Robert Louis Stevenson and roamed the world with him, ending up in Western Samoa, where her husband, author of “Treasure Island” and “Kidnapped,” died in 1894. In a letter to a friend written in 1875, Fanny described herself as a “clinging vine.” “I do not want to be the stately oak and stand alone,” she said. “It makes me lonesome. . . .” But her remarkable life and travels don’t exactly bear this out.

My interest in Fanny was piqued by a reading of Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Travels With a Donkey in the Cevennes” (Northwestern University Press, $12.95), the chronicle of a trek he took through the mountains of southern France shortly after he met and fell in love with Fanny. (She was from another world, 12 years his senior and still married to her ne’er-do-well first husband at the time.) It is a marvelous book, filled with the author’s musings on religion, history and, above all, love. “If we find but one to whom we can speak out of our heart freely,” he wrote, “we have no ground of quarrel with the world or God.” Intensely moral as well as romantic, he would later tell a friend: “Whatever you do, see that you don’t sacrifice a woman; that’s where all imperfect loves conduct us.”

Like his wife, Stevenson had an unquenchable wanderlust. But at the time he met Fanny, she’d done far more traveling than he, coping with three little ones on the road in sometimes horrifying circumstances, as anyone who reads Alexandra Lapierre’s excellent biography of her, “A Romance of Destiny” (Carroll & Graf, $26), learns. Unable to get a train in Panama in 1864, she and her daughter, Belle, walked 47 miles across the swampy, mosquito-ridden isthmus to catch a ship bound for San Francisco. From there, a stagecoach took them to the mining camp of Austin in northern Nevada, where Fanny was reunited with her then-husband, Sam. She made a home in a shack, starting a kitchen garden and routinely serving coffee to a band of curious Paiute Indians. When Sam’s mine failed and the family moved to San Francisco, Fanny took on bohemian airs, attending art school, smoking cigarettes and cooking Chinese.

By the time she gave up trying to reform her philandering husband and fled to Europe with the children, the transcontinental railroad had been laid. Still, it took 12 days and more than a hundred stops just to get from San Francisco to Indianapolis, with Fanny “lashed into her corset, sitting on seats with no back support or headrest and no place to lie down at night,” according to biographer Lapierre.

Fanny finally divorced Sam and married Stevenson in 1880, honeymooning in California, in a deserted mining camp north of the Napa Valley. Though her husband described the interlude in “Silverado Squatters” in fairly romantic terms, it couldn’t have been a picnic for Fanny, who was forced to make another home and tend to Stevenson when he fell ill with tuberculosis. And so it would go for the rest of their married life, as the couple traveled through Europe and America seeking a climate Stevenson could tolerate.

They found it at last on the Pacific island of Western Samoa, where they settled in 1890. While Stevenson wrote, Fanny went to work turning a rustic plantation beneath Mt. Vaea into yet another home--Stevenson’s last, as it came to pass. But not Fanny’s. She survived him by 20 years, labored to firmly establish his reputation, traveled and took a lover 40 years her junior (who later married her daughter, Belle).

In literary circles, Fanny has detractors who think she smothered Stevenson, and, according to the Lapierre biography, she was subject to frightening episodes of depression. Still, it’s unlikely that Stevenson would have lived as long as he did without her ministrations or indulged his passion for adventure without dauntless Fanny at his side. I wish I could have met her and, maybe more to the point, traveled with her.

For those who feel the same way, there are a handful of sites connected to her life with Stevenson that can be visited:

The Robert Louis Stevenson Museum contains a model of the bunkhouse on Mt. St. Helena where the couple honeymooned, as well as Stevenson’s wedding ring and Fanny’s black appliqued kimono; 140 Library Lane, St. Helena; telephone (707) 963-3757. Robert Louis Stevenson State Park, tel. (707) 942-4575, seven miles north of Calistoga on California 29, has a five-mile trail leading to the top of Mt. St. Helena. Near the top, it passes the site of the mining camp described in “Silverado Squatters.”

The Monterey State Historic Park includes the house where Stevenson stayed in 1879 when he traveled west, virtually penniless, to rescue Fanny from her hapless marriage; 20 Custom House Plaza, Monterey; tel. (831) 649-7118.

Vailima, the Stevenson plantation in Western Samoa, was recently renovated by the Robert Louis Stevenson Foundation. It is located 3 1/2 miles inland from the town of Apia. A path behind the house takes visitors past a bathing pool favored by the author and finally to the crest of Mt. Vaea, where Stevenson and Fanny are buried. His epitaph there is widely quoted: Home is the sailor, home from the sea/And the hunter home from the hill. Few, however, remember Fanny’s, penned by Stevenson before his death:

Teacher, tender comrade, wife

A fellow-farer true through life,

heart-whole and soul-free . . .