Robert Louis Stevenson Part II

Stevenson was not interested in law but agreed to read it, to please his father.   He led a more Bohemian life, in the 1870s…making friends with literary types.  He visited England, and met people who would become good friends and literary advisers.  In London he met Gosse and Leslie Stephen, (father of Virginia Woolf) who was the editor of the Cornhill Magazine.   He rejected Christianity and became an atheist and he began to frequent pubs and brothels.   He had intermittent health problems with his bad chest, which drove him to visit France for a warmer climate.   These trips gave him material for his travel books… which would become an important way for him to earn money and develop his writing skills.

In 1876, he had qualified for the Scottish bar but did not wish to practice law.   While on a trip to Belgium and France he met Fanny Osborne an American lady who was separated from her husband due to his infidelities.  She had taken her children and moved to France to study art.   They fell in love but she returned to America in 1878... to her husband.  Stevenson went on a trip to Southern France where he wrote Travels with a Donkey.  It is considered a classic of “outdoors” travel writing involving camping and travelling through the mountains of France.
But his feelings for Fanny were still strong and in 1879, he decided to travel to the USA to see her.  The voyage and travelling exhausted him, and he was living on a small income… trying to support himself by writing.  Fanny was now divorced from her husband and she came to him, in California to nurse him back to health.   They married and had a honeymoon in the Napa Valley.  Stevenson got on well with his stepson Lloyd Osbourne who collaborated with him on some writing projects.  He had been very ill but recovered with Fanny’s care and the couple returned to Scotland.  His parents disapproved of his marriage to an older divorced woman but they grew to like Fanny