Robert Louis Stevenson was not a man who wrote about women--his novels contain few female characters and so it is hard to know how much he understood about women—but there is no doubt about the main influence on the second half of his life was his wife, and this book delineates the how of it, if not the why. Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne was a married woman from Indiana when Stevenson met her in 1876. He was 25, she 10 years older than he with a lot more life experience. At that time she was a mother of two, and soon to be separated from her genial, improvident philanderer of a husband, Sam. He went to a Nevada silver mine, she to an artists’ colony in France--he was more of a con artist, a seeker of fortune, and she was more of a seeker of knowledge.
Stevenson courted her at Fontainebleau, near Paris, and he could not have been more different from the man she left behind. He had talent written all over him, for one thing. Among other qualities that appealed to Fanny and her children were Stevenson’s integrity and his irrepressible desire for adventure, in defiance of poor health. The two of them sought adventure in their time together, and that spirit is evident in the writing that he left behind. This is an unusual love story and gives a window into who the author was.
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