About the Project
Editor's Notes Bibliography Acknowledgements
Editor's Notes
Naming the “Vandegrifter"
Fanny Van de Grift Stevenson was affectionately titled the “vandegrifter" by the Stevenson family, reportedly by her father-in-law, Thomas. Though the term grifter has negative connotations, this nickname was used playfully, and Stevenson was known to the whole family as an unflappably honest, open, and straightforward woman. In fact, she signed many of her letters with this sobriquet, as seen below:
Dating the Stories
These four unpublished stories are not dated, and while it is difficult to triangulate with perfect certainty when they might have been written, there are some clues which help with their dating. The scrapbook, although dated 1876 by archivists, mostly holds materials from around 1878, which is the year Stevenson published her first story in St. Nicholas magazine. Given the similar content of the manuscripts and her early tales, as well as Stevenson’s position as a single mother in need of income in the late 1870s—by which time she had met Louis, and had long since been separated from her first husband, but had not yet secured a divorce—the stories were likely written closer to 1878, or at least within the last years of that decade.
Corrections & Regularisations
Moderate corrections have been made to the text of these tales for clarity, but the transcriptions follow the original documents as closely as possible. Edits or modifications by the author herself––such as strikethroughs or supralinear inclusions––are noted via the encoding, but in general additional editorial changes have been limited to adding speech marks or other punctuation where omitted, standardising capitalisations, and other silent grammatical regularisations.
