RLS In Love

R.L.S. in Love makes a powerful argument for recognising Stevenson as a love poet, a restless man constantly struggling with love and lust, invariable attracted to unobtainable or unsuitable partners, including distance relatives, older married women, servants, and prostitutes. The poems reflect the three main stages in Stevenson's emotional life: his late adolescence and early manhood characterised by a succession of trysts in the woods and dells of the Pentland hills, and encounters with working women in the Old Town brothels; his passionate but doomed relationship with Fanny Sitwell; and finally the troubled, infuriating but often ecstatic emotional journey with his wife.

"Fact or figment, whore or nymph, if Claire remains an enigma, there is no such mystery surrounding Mary H. She was real. Stevenson once declared his love ‘of the publican and harlot’, and Mary unashamedly belonged to the latter category. Even Balfour acknowledged her existence in a letter to Colvin in which he pompously and euphemistically refers to ‘the seasons of temptation. Most strongly besetting the ardent and poetic temperament, to seek solace among the crude allurements of the city streets.’ There is speculation that she was the prostitute that Louis told his parents that he intended to bring home to Heriot Row as his wife. The extent of the parental apoplexy can only be guessed at." Stuart Campbell