Stevenson, called Louis by family and friends, was 26 when he met 36-year-old Fanny in France in 1876.
“Under the wide and starry sky” is the opening line of an epitaph he wrote after becoming gravely ill on a trip to California in 1879.Ī woman’s profile graces the novel’s cover, but Stevenson, not Fanny, is the North Star of this story, and his struggles, more than Fanny’s, will win readers’ hearts. Hyde,” spent much of his life as an invalid before he died at 44. Stevenson, best known for “ Treasure Island” and “ The Strange Case of Dr. “Under the Wide and Starry Sky” by Nancy Horan (Ballantine) The latest pick for the “Today” show’s book club, it’s operatic, global in its settings and dead-on in its portrayal of pre-feminism-era women and their limited opportunities. Now, Horan’s second novel, “ Under the Wide and Starry Sky,” carries on this burgeoning genre with the story of 19th-century Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson and his American wife, Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne. Other authors, recognizing a good thing, have served up novels about Anne Morrow Lindbergh (“ The Aviator’s Wife,” by Melanie Benjamin ), Hadley Richardson Hemingway (“ The Paris Wife,” by Paula McLain ) and Ruth Mallory (“ Above All Things,” by Tanis Rideout). “ Loving Frank,” Nancy Horan’s popular 2007 novel about Frank Lloyd Wright’s tempestuous love affair with Mamah Cheney, jump-started the genre.
$26 Wives are enjoying a star turn in popular culture - from the surgically altered “Real Housewives” of New Jersey and Beverly Hills to the wives and not-quite wives of famous men whose scintillating stories are fueling a historical fiction genre all their own.
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