Robert Louis Stevenson: A Biography

The household became eerily quiet, like ‘a house in which somebody is still waiting burial’. His parents went into a state of hushed emergency, Margaret pathetically suggesting that her son join the minister’s youth classes, Thomas locked in his study, reading up Bishop Butler’s Analogy of Religion in order to rejoin the fray. ‘What am I to do?’ Stevenson wrote despairingly to his friend. ‘If all that I hold true and most desire to spread, is to be such death and worse than death, in the eyes of my father and mother, what the devil am I to do?’32

The fallout from Louis’s confession continued for months, his father’s anger and his mother’s distress erupting uncontrollably all through the spring and summer of 1873. Margaret wept at church, Thomas was full of dark threats and despairing glances, and condemned his son’s attempts at cheerfulness as ‘heartless levity’.33 When Bob went off to Antwerp to study art in the spring, Louis felt his misery at home even more sharply, and by the summer was almost prostrated by illness. This was one area where the youth could still count on a sympathetic response from his parents. They agreed that he should have a holiday, somewhere quiet in the countryside, with friendly, trustworthy people. Their choice was Cockfield Rectory in Suffolk, the home of Margaret’s niece Maud and her husband, Professor Churchill Babington.

Frances Sitwell was lying on a sofa near a window at her friend Maud Babington’s home when she saw a young man approach up the drive. He was wearing a straw hat and velvet jacket, carried a knapsack and looked hot, having just walked from Bury St Edmunds, a good eight miles away. ‘Here is your cousin,’ she remarked to Maud, who went out through the french window to meet him. The young man – very boyish, and with a strong Scottish accent – seemed shy to begin with, and jumped at the chance to go and visit the moat in the company of Mrs Sitwell’s ten-year-old son, Bertie. But by the end of the day, when he and she began to talk seriously to each other, ‘an instantaneous understanding’ sprang up between them,34 and strong mutual attraction. ‘Laughter, and tears, too, followed hard upon each other till late into the night,’ Mrs Sitwell wrote, ‘and his talk was like nothing I had ever heard before, though I knew some of our best talkers and writers.’35

Frances Sitwell was thirty-four when she met Stevenson, and had been married since the age of twenty to the Reverend Albert Sitwell, sometime private secretary to the Bishop of London and vicar of Minster, in Kent, since 1869. They had met in Ireland, where both grew up, and spent the earliest part of their marriage in India; Frances had also lived in Australia. The marriage was not a success, at least not from Mrs Sitwell’s point of view. No one seems to have had a good word to say for her husband, ‘a man of unfortunate temperament and uncongenial habits’, according to E.V. Lucas.36 The euphemism hints at cruelty and vice (was Sitwell an adulterer? a drinker?), but all we can be sure of is that by the time the couple moved to Minster with their two little boys, Frederick and Bertie, Frances was finding it necessary to spend long periods of time away from home visiting friends, of whom Maud Babington was the closest. Like Louis, she was an exile at Cockfield from an intolerable home life.

When Stevenson met her in the summer of 1873, Mrs Sitwell was mourning the death of her elder son only three months before, aged twelve. The tragedy seems to have catalysed her thoughts about a permanent separation from her husband, though she knew it would be difficult to effect one without Sitwell’s agreement. She and her surviving son were tied to ‘the Vicar’ indefinitely unless she could become financially independent, which meant finding a job, a very daunting prospect for a woman of her social standing at the time.

One thing she didn’t consider, and which speaks volumes about her character, was to throw herself into the arms of one or other of her many admirers. They were, on the whole, adorers rather than suitors, in whom she inspired devotion that verged on idolisation. ‘Divining intuition like hers was genius. Vitality like hers was genius,’ one of them wrote; another, ‘she was the soul of honour, discretion and sympathy’, ‘waiting for her smile is the most delightful of anticipations, and when it comes it is always dearer than you remembered, and irradiates all who are in her company with happiness’.37 Over the years she nurtured a string of needy young men, including Stevenson, Sidney Colvin, Cotter Morrison, Stephen Phillips and latterly Joseph Conrad, all of whom left ardent tributes to her virtues: a ‘good angel’, ‘a priceless counsellor’; a ‘deity’.38 But above and beyond the superlatives, a genuinely extraordinary character emerges: not a wit, a beauty or a coquette, but a woman of quiet, tender and very ardent feelings, who retained a childlike capacity for simple pleasures and the subtlest appreciation of sophisticated ones. Colvin remembers her clapping her hands for joy and ‘leaping in her chair’ at the anticipation of a gift or treat, and described her sympathy thus: ‘She cools and soothes your secret smart before ever you can name it; she divines and shares your hidden joy, or shames your fretfulness with loving laughter; she unravels the perplexities of your conscience, and finds out something better in you than you knew of; she fills you not only with generous resolutions but with power to persist in what you have resolved.’39 It was this paragon with whom Stevenson spent the month of August 1873. Sibylline, sensitive, brave, tender, distressed, bereaved, abused: he would have fallen in love with a tenth of her.

Mrs Sitwell, as we have seen, was delighted by the young Scot and within three days of his arrival at Cockfield had written to her friend Sidney Colvin to urge him to hurry if he wanted to meet ‘a brilliant and to my mind unmistakable young genius’40 who had ‘captivated the whole household’41 at Cockfield. Colvin had been a friend of hers (how good a friend I will discuss presently) since the late 1860s. They probably met through the Babingtons: Churchill Babington was made Professor of Archaeology at Cambridge during Colvin’s time there as an undergraduate. Mrs Sitwell intuited that Colvin and Stevenson would find each other interesting, but she also realised that Colvin, with his influential London literary connections, could be of use to her excitable new friend, who made no bones about the fact that the law was a bore and that he lived only for writing.

Sidney Colvin was only five years Stevenson’s senior, but had the air of a much older, more sedate person. Tall and thin, with papery dry skin, a rather ponderous manner and a speech impediment, he did not seem readily appealing. On graduating from Cambridge in 1867 he began a career as an art critic and literary commentator, writing for the Pall Mall Gazette, the Globe and the Fortnightly Review, three of the most prestigious periodicals of the day. In 1871 he became the Portfolio’s main art critic and had already published a short book; he was a member of the Savile Club (as was Fleeming Jenkin) and a friend of Burne-Jones and Rossetti (whose work he promoted avidly), and when Stevenson met him in 1873 he had just been appointed Slade Professor of Fine Arts at Cambridge. A young man so well-placed in the world might well have adopted a superior air with Maud Babington’s scruffy student cousin, but Colvin’s manner was always respectful, courteous and hesitant – he was a very English Englishman, and though not charming himself, highly appreciative of charm. It is hard to say who was more pleased when the train pulled in at Cockfield on 6 August, the ‘young genius’ from Edinburgh, excited to be meeting the sage of the Fortnightly Review, or Colvin himself:

If you want to realise the kind of effect [Stevenson] made, at least in the early years when I knew him best, imagine this attenuated but extraordinarily vivid and vital presence, with something about it that at first sight struck you as freakish, rare, fantastic, a touch of the elfin and unearthly, an Ariel. [ … ] he comprised within himself, and would flash on you in the course of a single afternoon, all the different ages and half the different characters of man, the unfaded freshness of a child, the ardent outlook and adventurous day-dreams of a boy, the steadfast courage of manhood, the quick sympathetic tenderness of a woman, and already, as early as the midtwenties of his life, an almost uncanny share of the ripe life-wisdom of old age.42

The weeks at Cockfield passed in simple pleasure trips and long lounging days. Louis was already a favourite with Maud and Professor Babington (who called him ‘Stivvy’), and was a welcome companion to Bertie Sitwell, with whom he played at toy theatres and piggyback rides. The party visited Lavenham and Melford, and Louis was so ardent a helper at the school picnic that he blistered his hand slicing bread for the sandwiches. Colvin came and went, having discussed at length possible essay and book projects that Stevenson could put forward to the publisher Alexander Macmillan, and Stevenson was so excited at the prospect that he was already composing a piece on ‘Roads’ as he walked the lanes around Cockfield. ‘Roads’ seems a very apt subject for this pivotal moment in Stevenson’s career, when at last there appeared to be some alternative to the path he had been set on by his parents. Soothed by Mrs Sitwell and sponsored by Colvin, Stevenson was on the brink of enjoying the literary life he craved.

‘Roads’ wasn’t the only piece of writing Stevenson began at Cockfield; there was also an epistolary novel, or perhaps the resuscitation of an earlier attempt at a novel under the encouragement of Mrs Sitwell. Nothing remains of it now, but the heroine’s name was Claire and the project seems to have been closely tied to Louis’s burgeoning feelings for Mrs Sitwell herself, framed around an imagined or anticipated correspondence with her.43 This may explain why the novel faltered pretty quickly after Louis and Mrs Sitwell were separated and began their real correspondence, which was to form such an important part of his output in the coming years. At the end of September, Louis was writing to Mrs Sitwell, ‘Of course I have not been going on with Claire. I have been out of heart for that; and besides it is difficult to act before the reality. Footlights will not do with the sun; the stage moon and the real, lucid moon of one’s dark life, look strangely on each other.’44

The record of the five weeks that Stevenson spent in Suffolk that summer is sparse but from the flood of correspondence that began as soon as he was separated from Mrs Sitwell at the end of August it becomes clear that he had in that time fallen deeply in love. In those first few days at Cockfield he must have felt that he had at last met the perfect woman, the endlessly sympathetic and eager listener he had craved all his life. Mrs Sitwell loved his high spirits, laughed at his jokes, but also encouraged his confidence, and understood immediately and without judging them his mood swings and volatile spirits. Her melting eyes seemed to see into his soul, her rendition of Bizet’s ‘Chant d’Amour’ in the long summer evenings left him swooning. In their walks around the village and during the long days in the Rectory gardens, Mrs Sitwell had confided her marital unhappiness and he the painful rift with his parents; she stroked his hair as he sat with his head on her lap; they were fellows in suffering and in sympathy. And Louis seems to have hoped and expected that they would become more than that. His early letters call her ‘my poor darling’, ‘my own dearest friend’, and refer to the complete candour and trust that they have shared as ‘all that has been between us’.45 In the early days, at least, he must have believed that once ‘that incubus’ Albert Sitwell was out of the way, and once he, Louis, had become a self-supporting writer, he would be free to pursue this love of a lifetime.

Mrs Sitwell’s feelings for Stevenson are very much harder to divine, as in later years she asked for all her side of their correspondence to be destroyed, and he obliged. The only surviving remarks about him by her are in a very short contribution to a collection of reminiscences called I Can Remember Robert Louis Stevenson, first published in 1922. There she describes them becoming ‘fast friends’ for life on first acquaintance, and briefly describes how she introduced him to Sidney Colvin. By the time this little article appeared, Stevenson’s letters (edited by Colvin) had been in print for a couple of decades, and it was no news to the reading public that he had been in thrall to his ‘Madonna’, as he later called her, in the early 1870s, nor that she had later – much later – married the editor of the letters.

Even with the evidence of Stevenson’s powerful feelings towards her, and the reciprocity implied by some chance remarks in his letters, even given the fact that she withheld (not surprisingly) some letters ‘too sacred and intimate to print’ from the Colvin editions,46 it seems unlikely that Frances Sitwell was in love with Stevenson in the erotic sense at this or any other time. Her relation to him seems consistently to have been that of an inordinately affectionate woman rather than a woman of passion. She reciprocated his feelings in intensity but not in kind, perhaps not correcting his romantic hopes or assumptions at first because she didn’t quite understand or admit them. From what Colvin says in a tribute to his by-then wife (published, anonymously, in 1908), Mrs Sitwell might be described as serially naïve or disingenuous about her sexual attractiveness:

In the fearlessness of her purity she can afford the frankness of her affections, and shows how every fascination of her sex may in the most open freedom be the most honorably secure. Yet in a world of men and women, such an one cannot walk without kindling once and again a dangerous flame before she is aware. As in her nature there is no room for vanity, she never foresees these masculine combustions, but has a wonderful art and gentleness in allaying them, and is accustomed to convert the claims and cravings of passion into the lifelong loyalty of grateful and contented friendship.47

‘Masculine combustions’ covers a lot of Stevenson’s behaviour around Mrs Sitwell, but none of Colvin’s, which perhaps explains why he won the lady in the end. Nothing about Colvin was combustible. It took nine years from the death of Albert Sitwell in 1894 for him to get round to marrying the widow, who was by then sixty-four years old. The reason for the delay was given as Colvin’s financial straits – he had an elderly mother to support – but this seems thin, or at the very least coldly prudent. For as E. V. Lucas remarked, by the turn of the century ‘all London knew’ that Colvin and Mrs Sitwell were a couple: they were constant companions though they lived apart.48 How this arrangement was cheaper or more convenient than getting married is hard to figure. The answer to the long nuptial delay seems much more likely to be Colvin not wanting to upset his mother, who died in 1902.

It is necessary to look so far ahead, into the next century, to get some idea of the network of relationships that developed between Stevenson, Mrs Sitwell and Colvin in the 1870s. The triangular pattern usually suggests strife and rivalry, but at Cockfield Stevenson met two friends who were separately very important to him and whose relationship with each other was strengthened, possibly cemented, by their mutual concern for him. What were Colvin’s relations with Mrs Sitwell in the 1870s? It is hard to tell, but I would guess that their liaison was not sexual to begin with (perhaps not ever), but an ardent friendship of the kind Mrs Sitwell also enjoyed with Stevenson. Colvin was less trouble than the young Scot, a gentle and undemanding devotee. He was her frequent companion in London and they spent time together privately (a risky business in the 1870s), including a holiday to Brittany in 1876, which Colvin wrote up lyrically in an article for the Cornhill.49 By 1884, when Colvin got his job at the British Museum and with it the Museum residence where Mrs Sitwell always appeared as hostess, it seems safe to assume that they were lovers. They could have been lovers any time from meeting in the late 1860s, of course, though somehow the whole affair seems more slow-burning than that, more discreet, rarefied and tentative. Also more honest: nothing was signalled to Stevenson when he began his doomed onslaught of devotion late in 1873, and if Colvin was already having an affair with Mrs Sitwell then, one might have expected him to stand guard carefully over all new ‘masculine combustions’ near his mistress, even if she was incapable of recognising them herself.50 Either way, Colvin’s selflessness in doing all he could to further Stevenson’s career is remarkable. For there was never a shadow of jealousy or pique in his dealings with the younger man, despite the fact – which must have been obvious to Colvin the minute he saw them together at the Rectory – that Louis was a serious rival for Mrs Sitwell’s attentions, not to say a potential monopoliser of them.

Nevertheless, there are a few intriguing scraps of evidence which could be made to argue the contrary. One is a letter which Bob Stevenson wrote to Louis on 6 February 1874, having met Colvin for the first time. He and Colvin had spoken, at cross purposes, about Stevenson’s situation, provoking this confidence from the professor:

He said [ … ] that he had been much grieved to observe the effect that certain emotions you had gone thro’ lately had had upon you. He said it was a first class thing for you to do and that he knew no other man who was so game for being on the spot as you and that whatever you had lost you had gained in him such a friend for life as it is difficult to gain. I thought he was not supposed to be cognizant of what had gone on at all. I am mystified first by you, more by him.51

Colvin was acknowledging an extreme act of generosity on Stevenson’s part – one that would deserve his never-ending fidelity in return (which he gave). What could this have been other than ceding to ‘the first-comer’, as Louis elsewhere calls Colvin, his love-interest in Mrs Sitwell? But in February 1874 whatever Stevenson might have ‘lost’ was not obvious from his letters or his demeanour (although he clearly did try hard to sublimate his feelings for Mrs Sitwell later that and the following year). This could (just) be because his ‘loss’ occurred before the letters to Mrs Sitwell begin, i.e. during the month at Cockfield in 1873. Stevenson himself referred in his first letters to her of ‘all that has passed between us’, and here is Bob talking of how he thought Colvin ignorant of ‘what had gone on’. Mrs Sitwell herself became oddly jealous when a rival for Louis’s attention appeared on the scene in the spring of 1874: her possessiveness then seems suggestive.

Then there is the ambiguous evidence of a letter from Graham Balfour to his wife Rhoda on the day in 1899 when he was appointed by Robert Louis Stevenson’s estate to write the official biography of the author. Fired up with excitement at the prospect of writing Stevenson’s life, and perhaps to test the extent to which he was going to be trusted, Balfour asked the widow, Fanny Stevenson, ‘straight out about F. Sitwell’:

and she says Yes. F.S. used to tell people whom she knew well, as she wished not to be on false pretences. But I fancy the fat is nearly in that fire.

Tamaitai [Fanny Stevenson] is rather bitter.52

The answer was Yes, but what was the question? It could only have been ‘Are Colvin and Mrs Sitwell lovers?’ if Graham Balfour was really out of the loop, for E.V. Lucas says that ‘all London knew’ about the relationship by this date, and the elderly-looking couple were discreet, hugely respectable and beyond the reach of harmful gossip, Albert Sitwell being five years dead. If the question was ‘Were Colvin and Mrs Sitwell lovers back in the 1870s?’ – which would explain the phrase ‘F.S. used to tell people whom she knew well, as she wished not to be on false pretences’ – what is this fat that is nearly in the fire? The exposure of Mrs Sitwell’s long-term adultery? No one was likely to do that, certainly not a biographer (and cousin) of Robert Louis Stevenson, to whom both Colvin and Mrs Sitwell had been devoted. And what was ‘Tamaitai’ ‘rather bitter’ about?*

But what if the question was ‘Were Stevenson and Mrs Sitwell ever lovers?’ Apart from Mrs Sitwell herself, and Colvin, only Fanny Stevenson could have been expected to know the answer to that one, and it seems a more pressing question for Balfour to ask at this point of maximum favour with the widow than whether or not an obvious couple were a couple. The question cannot be confidently resolved one way or the other, but it does leave open some intriguing possibilities.

The end of August came; it was time to go home, but Stevenson strung out his departure from Cockfield by staying a few days on the way back to Edinburgh at Colvin’s cottage in Norwood, with a visit to the Sitwells’ house in Chepstow Place in Bayswater. There he met ‘le chapelain’, Mrs Sitwell’s problematic husband, and was able to observe secretly the marriage he had begun to know very well from one side.* When they sat together under a tree in Suffolk, or walked around Kensington Gardens on their last day in London, the gentle, tender looks of Mrs Sitwell were a balm to Louis’s heart. His first letter to her, written when he got back to Heriot Row, shows an intimacy that had been requited fully in spirit, if not in deed:

I am very tired, dear, and somewhat depressed after all that has happened. Do you know, I think yesterday and the day before were the two happiest days of my life. It seems strange that I should prefer them to what has gone before; and yet after all, perhaps not. O God, I feel very hollow and strange just now. I had to go out to get supper and the streets were wonderfully cool and dark, with all sorts of curious illuminations at odd corners from the lamps; and I could not help fancying as I went along all sorts of foolish things – chansons – about showing all these places to you, Claire, some other night; which is not to be. Dear, I would not have missed last month for eternity.55

Louis’s new, dizzying intimacy with Mrs Sitwell in some senses precipitated the upheavals that were to take place in the Stevenson household that year, as he had for the first time someone – some woman – in whom to confide everything, and more. There seems to have been no limit to Mrs Sitwell’s capacity for confidences, and the resulting flood of emotion from her young correspondent makes remarkable reading. The letters are highly stylised, self-indulgent monologues, in which passages of elaborate description are punctuated with long rhapsodies about his feelings. Perhaps, having been anticipated in his stillborn fiction, ‘Claire’, Stevenson had trouble establishing a non-rhetorical tone. Set beside his letters to Baxter, which are full of salty jokes, raucous verses and long vernacular rambles in the character of Tam Johnson (ancient drunken venial Writer to the Signet), those to Mrs Sitwell seem the work of another person altogether. Their humourlessness is striking. Chagrined that there was no quick response to one letter, he wrote on 27 September:

I have a fear that something must have happened, and so I write frankly and fully, because I fear I may never write to you again; but O my dear, you know – you see – you must feel, in what perfect faith and absolute submission I am writing. You must feel that I shall still feel as I have felt and will work as well for you and towards you, without any recognition, as I could work with all recognition. Remember always that you are my Faith. And now, my dearest, beautiful friend, good night to you. I shall never feel otherwise to you, than now I do when I write myself

Your faithfullest friend R.L.S.56

So much fear, and so much feeling. Pages and pages went off every day to his ‘friend in London’ (which is all he told Baxter of the connection57), and every day he itched to get down to the Spec, where Mrs Sitwell was sending her replies so as not to arouse enquiry at Heriot Row. Stevenson was rather fascinated by the spectacle of himself in love, and at times asked Mrs Sitwell for copies of his letters to be sent back, for him to work into possibly saleable prose. And in the constant exercise of sensibility, he made some interesting discoveries, such as this reason for not being able ‘to bring before you, what went before me’: