A WILDER SHORE

Portrait of an unconventional literary marriage.

Journalist Peri draws on considerable archival sources to create a perceptive portrait of the unlikely marriage of Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) and Fanny Osbourne (1840-1914). Stevenson, “a university-educated writer from a prominent family in Scotland,” had just passed the Scottish bar. Fanny grew up in Indiana, lived in a mining camp with her philandering husband and three children, and most recently had settled in San Francisco. Eager to escape a stultifying marriage, grieving the death of her eldest son, she took her remaining children to France, where she and her daughter planned to study art. There she met Stevenson, also eager to escape; he was intent on pursuing a writing career, much to his father’s disappointment. They were a study in contrasts: Stevenson, skinny, unkempt, sickly; Fanny, attractive and forthright, with a personality “as big as the American frontier, with a blend of female sensuality and masculine swagger.” They quickly fell in love. Peri recounts the couple’s peripatetic journeys. They visited with Stevenson’s family in Edinburgh and traveled to Davos, Switzerland, for tuberculosis treatment. In the English resort town Bournemouth, they kindled a friendship with Henry James, in town to care for his sister. They went to the U.S., where the author of Treasure Island, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Kidnapped was hailed as a celebrity, and to French Polynesia on the first leg of two years of travels. A chain smoker with many medical maladies, Stevenson died in Samoa. Fanny proved more than a caregiver for her invalid husband: “She was a sharp critic and observer, and had a colorful imagination, qualities that he valued and relied on,” Peri comments, noting that he left his writing at her bedside each night for her to critique. Although Osbourne’s work came after Stevenson’s health and writing, Peri's extensive exegeses of her stories judge them to “sit comfortably and creditably among those of other female magazine writers of her day.”

A richly detailed chronicle of two eventful lives.