Still living at home when not with friends or at relatively inexpensive lodgings on his travels, Stevenson gradually began to publish in periodicals. Many of his friends were writers and artists, and much of this early publication seems to have come through such association. Still, Stevenson was a good and stylish writer, disciplined and dependable, and he began to attract readers and reviewers, although not in anything like the numbers that would come later. There may also have been a nagging suspicion on his part that, at this point in his life, he ought to be making his own way in the world, instead of relying on his father for financial assistance.
In 1876, when he was twenty-five, Stevenson met Frances Vandegrift Osbourne, an American woman nearly ten years his senior, at an art colony in France, where he was staying with his cousin Bob. Fanny had come to Europe, bringing her two children, to escape from a bad marriage and to study art. She and Stevenson fell in love and began an affair, but some time later she returned to California to attempt reconciliation with her husband. When the attempt failed, in 1879, Stevenson went to the United States to join her, and after her divorce, they married. By then, he had published two travel journals, An Inland Voyage (1878) and Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes (1879); his American journey produced two more books, Across the Plains and The Amateur Emigrant, which were not published until 1892 and 1895. He returned to Scotland in 1880 with Fanny and her young son, Lloyd (her older daughter, Belle, stayed in the United States), but the three moved several times in the next few years, seeking a cure for Stevenson's tuberculosis.
