

In this work of perceptive reportage and open-minded and humane observation the voice is less buoyant and does not avoid observation of hardship and suffering. This experience was to be the subject of his next large-scale work The Amateur Emigrant (written 1879-80, published in part in 1892 and in full in 1895), an account of this journey to California, which Noble (1985: 14) considers his finest work. Two years later she returned to California and a year after that, in August 1879, RLS set out on the long journey to join her.

They met immediately after his “inland voyage”, in September 1876 at Grez, a riverside village south-east of Paris he was twenty-five, and she was thirty-six, an independent American “New Woman”, separated from her husband and with two children. The meeting with his future wife, Fanny, was to change the rest of his life.
