There are lots of opinions about Fanny Osbourne, with whom Robert Louis Stevenson fell in love in France in 1876. But Stevenson didn't equivocate. He traveled 6,000 miles to propose marriage to her. Both images are from Historic Bay Area Visionaries, set to be published by History Press in October.
Last week I began the true tale of the writer Robert Louis Stevenson's romance with a woman from California, Fanny Osbourne, whom he met in France in 1876. It was a complicated liaison: she was eleven years older than he and had been married for twenty years to someone else. Adding to the difficulties: he lived in Scotland and she lived 6,000 miles away in California.
Stevenson was not deterred. He had come to believe Fanny--whose husband was a bit of a rogue--was not happily married. When, in 1879, he heard she had left her husband Sam in Oakland and was studying art in Monterey, Stevenson followed her there. He had to cross the Atlantic by steamship and then cross the American continent on the transcontinental railroad--and this was just three years after Custer and his troops had been wiped out at the Little Bighorn. It was a rough journey.
He was from a wealthy family and his parents very much disapproved of the relationship. So, he sneaked away from his family home with very little money in his pocket, not knowing if his parents--on whom he depended financially--would ever speak to him again.
Here's the rest of it in this week's edition of the Los Altos Town Crier.
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