Under the Wide and Starry Sky

This is an enjoyable and interesting novel based on historical fact, about the passionate and productive relationship between Fanny Osbourne and Robert Louis Stevenson.  The story is true to the major events in their lives and some dialog is based on letters or diaries, though most is created out of the author's sympathetic understanding of their characters - and is quite believable.

RLS first meets American Fanny Osbourne in France, where she has fled from her philandering husband, taking her three children to Paris to study art.  Stevenson is smitten with her and eventually, though he is 11 years younger, they begin a relationship - which is complicated by her husband's determination to regain his family (while retaining his extracurricular love life).  In confusion, she returns to California and her husband, leaving RLS in doubt and near despair, though eventually she writes and pleads with him to come to California to rescue her.  All these events intertwine with Stevenson's early attempts to establish himself as a writer - not only because this is his passion, but also because of his determination to earn enough to support his potential family.  The very emotional and uncertain story of whether and how Fanny and RLS will get together forms the crux of the first half of the book.

The second half of their story is framed by the terrible state of Stevenson's health and Fanny's wholly devoted and exceptionally skillful efforts to keep him alive.  This quest necessitates travels to various climates that might help Stevenson's severe tuberculosis, including Davos, the English seaside, voyages at sea and, finally, Samoa, where RLS becomes the healthiest he has been in his entire life and where he wholeheartedly embraces the people, language and land of Samoa.  This portion of the book is energized by Fanny's devotion to Stevenson, which, however, deprives her of the time to pursue her own artistic ambitions, and by her increasing estrangement from Stevenson, who begins to dismiss Fanny's artistic abilities and needs as inferior to his own.  Eventually, these strains lead to or intensify severe episodes of mental illness, shocking Stevenson, who then honestly and seriously repents his ill treatment of Fanny.  Their relationship is recovering slowly until Stevenson's early and sudden death, not from tuberculosis, but a cerebral hemorrhage.

This was a very satisfying read for me - and has been very favorably reviewed by readers - but I suspect it's of special interest mainly to those who, like me, think, or rather hope, that they actually were Robert Louis Stevenson in a prior incarnation.