Claire Harman - Robert Louis Stevenson - A Biography

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.