writings owed their existence to her."

An article appearing in the _Literary Digest_ shortly after her death
touches upon this point:

"Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson was content to remain in the background
and let her husband reap all the glory for his literary achievements,
and the result was that her part in his career had probably been
minimized in the public mind. She was a great deal more than a mere
domestic help meet."

From her old and attached friend, Mr. S. S. McClure, comes this
sincere tribute:

"The more I saw of the Stevensons the more I became convinced that
Mrs. Stevenson was the unique woman in the world to be Stevenson's
wife.... When he met her her exotic beauty was at its height, and with
this beauty she had a wealth of experience, a reach of imagination, a
sense of humor, which he had never found in any other woman. Mrs.
Stevenson had many of the fine qualities that we usually attribute to
men rather than to women; a fair-mindedness, a large judgment, a
robust, inconsequential philosophy of life, without which she could
not have borne, much less shared with a relish equal to his own, his
wandering, unsettled life, his vagaries, his gipsy passion for
freedom. She had a really creative imagination, which she expressed in
living. She always lived with great intensity, had come more into
contact with the real world than Stevenson had done at the time when
they met, had tried more kinds of life, known more kinds of people.
When he married her, he married a woman rich in knowledge of life and
the world.

"She had the kind of pluck that Stevenson particularly admired. He was
best when he was at sea, and although Mrs. Stevenson was a poor sailor
and often suffered greatly from seasickness, she accompanied him on
all his wanderings in the South Seas and on rougher waters, with the
greatest spirit. A woman who was rigid in small matters of domestic
economy, who insisted on a planned and ordered life, would have
worried Stevenson terribly.

"A sick man of letters never married into a family so well fitted to
help him make the most of his powers. Mrs. Stevenson and both of her
children were gifted; the whole family could write. When Stevenson was
ill, one of them could always lend a hand and help him out. Without
such an amanuensis as Mrs. Strong,[76] Mrs. Stevenson's daughter, he
could not have got through anything like the amount of work he turned
off. Whenever he had a new idea for a story, it met,