THE 10 "lost loves" of Robert Louis Stevenson - including teenage crushes, affairs with prostitutes, failed proposals and dalliances with married women -will be revealed today.

The world-famous Scottish author had several colourful relationships with women before he married his wife Fanny Osbourne in 1880, research by a biographer of the writer has found.

Today is Robert Louis Stevenson Day 2013 and the author will be celebrated by readings of his work in Edinburgh, walking tours, and other events.

The journalist and author Jeremy Hodges will detail a list of women with whom Stevenson had relationships before he made a journey to California to marry his future wife.

Mr Hodges said these women have been forgotten or deliberately obscured by both the author himself and his friends, family and publishers over the years, although their names would later appear in his works.

However the author, who will deliver an address today on the Lost Loves of Louis as part of the RLS celebrations, believes Katharine, Jeannie, Mary H, Kate, Madonna, Eugenia, Charlotte, Eve, Leila and Flora all played a key part in the development of the man and the writer, who was known to his friends and family as Louis.

He added: "He believed in freedom, and in those days he was perhaps called a bohemian, while in the 1960s he would have been called a hippy - he had a great desire to be free [in his love life] which was a problem in the 1860s; it got you into trouble.

"In Edinburgh at the time there were two types of women, the 'pure' who he were encouraged to marry, and the prostitutes, and he wasn't very happy with that situation: the problem was he lived in a repressed and hypocritical city in Edinburgh."

The first relationship the writer had, Mr Hodges says, was with Katharine Stevenson, his cousin. It was a "boy and girl romance" in the Borders but their "innocent love" was fleeting and she went on to marry Sydney De Mattos: however, Stevenson later "protected" her after she left her husband and even feared being cited in her eventual divorce.

Jeannie was a woman he met when he was 19, a 16-year-old who stayed at Buckstone Farm near Swanston. In 1870, Stevenson told his cousin Bob that he had been "very much a hit with a certain damsel, who shall remain nameless".

Later, Hodges says, Stevenson "spent long hours reading and trying to write in a brothel in Leith Street, where he was befriended by 'threepenny whores'." One of these part-time prostitutes, who he called Mary H, fell in love with him although later he confessed: "It never occurred to me that she thought of me except in the way of business."

At the age of 20, he fell in love with a girl called Kate Drummond in a "brothel or shebeen in Leith Street" and wanted to marry her - 20 years later, he would write a novel whose heroine is Catriona Drummond.

Later, Stevenson met a married woman, Fanny Sitwell, and they had a "passionate but unconsummated secret affair, conducted almost entirely through letters".

Eugenia was a "beautiful housemaid" with whom Stevenson had a clinch in an Edinburgh graveyard - her real name was Euphemia Spence, a 16-year-old scullery maid from Orkney.

In the 1870s, Stevenson was friendly with Professor Henry Fleeming Jenkin, whose neighbour in Great Stuart Street was the Scottish judge Lord Mackenzie, and Stevenson had an "admiration" for one of his daughters, Charlotte.

Eve was the sister of one of Stevenson's closest friends, Sir Walter Simpson, a woman Stevenson said he once "seriously dreamed of marrying".

The author met Leila while involved in amateur dramatics, and would often walk her home. Finally, Flora was another actress, and he seems to have proposed to her.