Robert Louis Stevenson may have played by book in his love life

Published on Thursday 13 January 2011 16:07

MANY believe Robert Louis Stevenson's book Catriona was his most convincing love story.

AFFAIRS: Robert Louis Stevenson was born and raised in the Capital in the latter half of the 19th century but later travelled the world

And there may well be good reason for that if new research into the Treasure Island author is to be believed.

It suggests that Catriona - which continued the adventures of Stevenson's Kidnapped hero, David Balfour, who falls for and eventually marries the eponymous heroine - was far from just a work of fiction.

Author Jeremy Hodges, whose book Lamplit, Vicious Fairy Land is being serialised on Edinburgh Napier University's Robert Louis Stevenson website, believes that Catriona - Gaelic for Catherine or Kate - may well have been Stevenson's secret love.

Mr Hodges said: "There was a real Miss Drummond - a Kate Drummond - who can be linked with Stevenson's low-life Edinburgh haunts as a young man." Mr Hodges said the love story was largely "dismissed as a myth" which, according to his research, was "quite an oversight".

A 1924 biography of Stevenson by John A Steuart previously named Kate Drummond. But studying birth and census records has allowed Mr Hodges, who lives in Falkirk, to establish that a real Kate Drummond did indeed exist - and that she bore many similarities with Stevenson's Catriona and Mr Steuart's earlier claims.

"Her uncle lived in Leith Street - the same red-light district identified by Steuart as her home," said Mr Hodges.

"And her father hailed from Perthshire, just like Stevenson's fictional Catriona Drummond, while her mother's family were from Prestonpans - scene of the Jacobite victory in which Catriona's father James fought."

Mr Hodges, 56, said the real Kate Drummond did not marry and ended up back in Perthshire looking after her younger siblings, after Stevenson's father allegedly forced him to end the romance.

Mr Hodges added: "This would have been an inglorious episode, and would account for Stevenson's lasting feelings of guilt. Years later, it's as if he was trying to exorcise the ghost of Kate Drummond by giving the story a happy ending through Catriona."

Mr Hodges has spent 10 years researching the new biography and claims Kate may also have been the model for Christina Elliot in Stevenson's unfinished masterpiece Weir of Hermiston.

"Neither heroine bears the slightest resemblance to Stevenson's wife, the American divorcee Fanny Osbourne," he said.

"Both these relationships are well chronicled, yet for a crucial eight-month period when the Kate Drummond affair was allegedly at its height, no letters of Stevenson's survive apart from one printed in a church magazine.

"Since he was normally a prolific correspondent, this suggests either he or someone close to him may have destroyed letters from this period. Certainly he later made reference to letters from an unnamed girl in straitened circumstances which he kept for a while and then burned."

Professor Linda Dryden, creator and owner of the RLS website, said: "We are delighted to be publishing Jeremy's book. It has proved to be an engaging and moving account of Stevenson's life in Edinburgh and continues to throw up fascinating new insights into his life."

Lamplit, Vicious Fairy Land is currently being serialised free of charge at www.robert-louis-stevenson.org.