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Before there was Treasure Island, there was a thinner, shakier kind of adventure: a sick writer in and around San Francisco, trying to make a marriage and a living at the same time.
Robert Louis Stevenson came to California in 1879 for Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne, an American he had met in France in 1876. It was not a simple romance. Fanny was still legally married to Samuel Osbourne when Stevenson first arrived, and she was about ten years older than he was. During that California courtship, Stevenson moved between Monterey and San Francisco before the two finally married in San Francisco in 1880.
This is the part of the story people tend to skip past on the way to the famous books. But it matters. In 1880, Stevenson was living in and around San Francisco, trying to earn money from his writing while in poor health, troubled by recurring serious chest illness. He and Fanny had very little money after their marriage. Her son, Lloyd Osbourne, was part of Stevenson’s household in California, joining a family life that was still taking shape and would later become a literary partnership.
What makes this San Francisco chapter so vivid is that it feels less like a prelude than a forge. After the wedding, Stevenson and Fanny went to the abandoned Silverado mining camp on Mount Saint Helena for their honeymoon. That experience led directly to The Silverado Squatters. His overland trip to California would later become the basis for The Amateur Emigrant and Across the Plains.
And that is the lovely irony here. Treasure Island would not appear until 1883, after this hard season was over. Stevenson left California in 1880, traveling to Scotland with Fanny and Lloyd Osbourne. But in San Francisco, before the boyish swashbuckling fame, he was already gathering something deeper: the life he would write from, and a lasting connection to the Pacific world that began here, in struggle, love, and motion.