EdRLS

The New Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Works of Robert Louis Stevenson

Fanny Stevenson’s short stories

with 4 comments

Sarah Ames, research assistant for New Arabian Nights: The Dynamiter, has this request for anyone out there interested in Fanny Stevenson:

Work is currently well underway for the EdRLS edition of More New Arabian Nights: The Dynamiter, which is being edited by John Lyon (University of Bristol). This was Stevenson’s only prose narrative collaboration with Fanny Van de Grift Stevenson (they also collaborated on a play, “The Hanging Judge”), and the Introduction of our edition will naturally examine the nature of that collaboration, and the question of Fanny’s contribution to the text. In order to do this we will be comparing samples of Fanny Stevenson’s writings with the text of The Dynamiter, to see if there are any similarities between the language in the texts, such as distinctive choices of words and sentence constructions.

With this in mind, we are currently working on digitizing Fanny Stevenson’s published short stories, with the aim of publishing them certainly as an on-line resource, and possibly as an appendix to the edition. Tracking these down, however, has been difficult, and has involved searching for a number of ‘different’ authors: ‘Fanny Stevenson’; ‘Fanny Van de Grift’; ‘Fanny Van de Grift Stevenson’ (with ‘Vandegrift’ variants); ‘Fanny Osbourne’, ‘F. M. Osbourne’; ‘Mrs Robert Louis Stevenson’…. With the help of Roger Swearingen and Richard Dury, our list now stands as follows:

‘Too Many Birthdays’ (St. Nicholas, 1878)
‘Chy Lung, The Chinese Fisherman’ (St. Nicholas, 1880)
‘The Warlock’s Shadow’ (Belgravia, 1886)
‘Miss Pringle’s Neighbors’ (Scribner’s Magazine, 1887)
‘The Nixie’ (Scribner’s Magazine, 1888)
‘The Half-White’ (Scribner’s Magazine, 1891)
‘Under Sentence of the Law: The Story of a Dog’ (McClure’s, 1893)
‘Anne’ (Scribner’s Magazine, 1899)

So far, we have digitized about half of these; we are still looking for scanned copies of: ‘Too Many Birthdays’, ‘The Warlock’s Shadow’ and ‘Chy Lung’.

Any help with our hunt for Fanny Stevenson’s texts would be gratefully received: does anyone possess scanned copies or scannable photocopies (or original magazines) of the two texts mentioned above? And does anyone know of any other of her short stories, besides the ones listed above, which were published?

4 Responses

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  1. The RLS Museum in St. Helena has a xerox of the original St. Nicholas article ‘Chy Lung, The Chinese Fisherman’ (1880). If it would be of help, we could scan it and email it off to you next week. Just let me know, Marissa

    director4rlsm

    02/03/2012 at 10:19 pm

    • Thank you so much, Marissa, that is great news! We will be in touch.

      pennyfielding

      03/03/2012 at 11:40 am

  2. The contribution of Fanny in the Dynamiter is to be found in the 3 narratives by the womens. I think she has written theses tales and perhaps RLS has rewritten them. But you can feel theses tales are not originally by RLS.

    vb

    09/03/2012 at 6:58 pm

  3. All three of the “missing” stories can easily be downloaded from on-line texts of St Nicholas and Belgravia.

    Hilary Beattie

    07/10/2013 at 5:25 pm


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