02/11/2022
By Kate Stone Lombardi

You didn’t back up?

Those are words you should never say to anyone who has lost days, weeks, or years of work on a computer. Most of us who have experienced the stomach plunging, heart-racing, dry-throated realization that everything you’ve been laboring on is gone — just gone— have learned this the hard way. (And yes, I now back up to the cloud and an external hard drive.)

But what about writers of yesteryear who worked with paper and pen? Their products may not have vanished from a computer screen and into the ether, but nonetheless, the written word was no more secure. And they have lessons for the rest of us about how to handle the loss.

Was it a form of literary criticism or the an act of deranged marital vandalism? Robert Lewis Stevenson, debilitated by tuberculosis and maddened by medicinal cocaine, didn’t have time to think it though. When Stevenson’s wife Fanny burned his only draft of “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” he frantically wrote the story all over again in three days. From his invalid bed. All 30,000 words of it. By hand.

Fanny’s culpability in destroying the original manuscript only came to light 115 years later. Read more on Medium, click here.