The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson

by Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez

• CHAPTER PAGE

• Ancestors [1]
• Early Days in Indiana [9]
• On the Pacific Slope [26]
• France, and the Meeting at Grez [42]
• In California with Robert Louis Stevenson [55]
• Europe and the British Isles [82]
• Away to Sunnier Lands [124]
• The Happy Years in Samoa [167]
• The Lonely Days of Widowhood [226]
• Back To California [260]
• Travels in Mexico and Europe [279]
• The Last Days at Santa Barbara [297]

ILLUSTRATIONS

• Fanny Van de Grift Stevenson during the English period [Frontispiece]
• Facing Page
• John Keen, about 83 years of age, maternal great-grandfather of Fanny Van de Grift Stevenson [2]
• Jacob Van de Grift, about 56 years of age, father of Fanny Van de Grift Stevenson [6]
• The Van de Grift residence at the corner of Illinois and Washington Streets, Indianapolis [22]
• The bridge at Grez [46]
• Fanny Osbourne at about the time of her first meeting with Robert Louis Stevenson [48]
• Robert Louis Stevenson in the French days [50]
• Fanny Osbourne at the time of her marriage to Robert Louis Stevenson [78]
• The house at Vailima with the additions made to the first structure [194]
• Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson [262]
• The house at Hyde and Lombard Streets, San Francisco, with some alterations in the way of bay windows, etc., which have been made since Mrs. Stevenson sold it [266]
• The house at Vanumanutagi ranch [274]
• Stonehedge at Santa Barbara [298]
• The last portrait of Mrs. Stevenson [306]
• The funeral procession as it wound up the hill [332]
• The tomb, showing the bronze tablet with the verse from Stevenson's poem to his wife [336]

THE LIFE OF MRS. ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

CHAPTER I

ANCESTORS

To arrive at a full understanding of the complex and unusual character of Fanny Van de Grift Stevenson, which perhaps played as large a part as her beauty and intellectual charm in drawing to her the affections of one of the greatest romance writers of our day, one must go back and seek out all the uncommon influences that combined to produce it—a long line of sturdy ancestors, running back to the first adventurers who left their sheltered European homes and sailed across the sea to try their fortunes in a wild, unknown land; her childhood days spent among the hardy surroundings of pioneer Indiana, with its hints of a past tropical age and its faint breath of Indian reminiscence; the early breaking of her own family ties and her fearless adventuring by way of the Isthmus of Panama to the distant land of gold, and her brave struggle against adverse circumstances in the mining camps of Nevada. All these prenatal influences and personal experiences, so foreign to the protected lives of the women of Stevenson's own race, threw about her an atmosphere of thrilling New World romance that appealed with irresistible force to the man who was himself Romance personified.

Fanny Stevenson was a lineal descendant of two of the oldest families in the United States, her first ancestors landing in this country in the early part of the seventeenth century. In 1642 Jöran Kyn, called "The Snow White," reached America in the ship Fama as a member of the life-guard of John Printz, governor of the Swedish colony established in the New World by King Gustavus Adolphus. He took up a large tract of land and was living in peace and comfort on the Delaware River when William Penn landed in America. He was the progenitor of eleven generations of descendants born on American soil. His memory is embalmed in an old document still extant as "a man who never irritated even a child."

In the list of his descendants one Matthias stands out as "a tall handsome man, with a very melodious voice which could be intelligibly heard at times across the Delaware."