In 1875, Fanny Osbourne, fed up with her prostitute happy husband, leaves California with her sons, Sammy (7), Hervey (4), and her daughter, Belle (16) for Antwerp, Belgium. Once there, Fanny hoped to get into a famous art school but didn’t realize that they don’t admit females. Hervey gets sick (consumption?), and she is advised to go to Paris and see an American doctor. As Fanny and Belle go to art school in Paris, Hervey seems to recover. Then Hervey suddenly dies. Fanny is filled with guilt, as her husband, Sam implies that Hervey wouldn’t have gotten sick if they stayed in California. Fanny and the children move to the Hotel Chevillon in Grez-sur-Loing, France. At the time, this was the heart of a commune of artist, musicians, and writers. She meets Bob Stevenson (R.L.S.’s cousin), who is there in early May to rid the area of Americans, so his artsy friends can arrive in the summer. But, Bob likes Fanny, and she stays at the hotel as an artist in training.
Meanwhile, we learn that R.L.S. of Edinburgh, Scotland has been sickly all his life. His father, Thomas, is a famous engineer of Lighthouses in Scotland. He expected his son to be an engineer, then a Lawyer. R.L.S. only wanted to be a writer. The on again and off again relationship with Thomas and his agnostic writer-to be son is done magnificently by Horan. When R.L.S. arrives by canoe at the Hotel Chevillon to meet his cousin Bob and friends Charles Baxter and William Henley, it only takes him a few days to fall in love with the cigarette smoking, sharp tongued, Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne. This is the start of their love affair. R.L.S. gets sick; Fanny nurses him back to health. This will happen throughout the novel. Fanny’s husband, Sam, comes to Paris to try to convince Fanny to return to California. Fanny wants a divorce, Sam refuses. In the meantime, Fanny’s friend from England, Margaret Wright, writes a story about the Grez crowd in Scribner’s Magazine and paints Fanny behaving as a cigarette smoking seductress so soon after the death of her son. She writes that Fanny is “barbaric.” Fanny is devastated by the article. Her husband reiterates that Hervey would be alive today if she didn’t drag her children to Europe. Fanny decides to give Sam another chance and goes back to California with him. R.L.S. is devastated!
As you can imagine, the reconvened marriage of Sam and Fanny didn’t work as Sam continued his affairs with prostitutes. On page 149, R.L.S. gets a telegram from Fanny: “Louis, I’m lost and sick. Need you.” Before departing for New York on the Devonia, R.L.S. wrote a will and an epitaph in case he died in route to California. He wrote a poem to be used on his gravestone that began ”Under the wide and starry sky, Dig the grave and let me lie.” The next 300 pages or so follow the now married Stevensons as the pastoral couple they become. I thought Nancy Horan’s portrayal of Fanny’s emotions was the strength of the story. Imagine being a talented painter and writer in your own right, as she was, and be looked upon as just Robert’s wife. Called a seductress by a supposed friend, called a peasant by R.L.S. (which he regretted), and totally ignored or disliked by Robert’s circle of friends. It’s no wonder that she finally had that mental breakdown near the end of R.L.S’s life in Somoa. Folks, this is a wonderful novel, rich in history and subject matter. If you are going to read only one book this year, then read this one.
RATING: 5 out of 5 stars
Comment: I have three other parts of the book that I would like to talk about. I would have mentioned them in the review, but I would rather have the reader discover these by him/herself, besides the review was starting to get too long.
The first one was when R.L.S. was giving a young writer named Adelaide a writing lesson. R.L.S. wanted Adelaide to describe a place for her evening's homework assignment.The next day Adelaide described her mother's garden. R.L.S.'s reaction? "This is absolutely appalling. You say 'green lawn' in this paragraph, everyone knows a lawn is green. Never use green to describe a lawn. In fact, never use the word! Get rid of all these adjectives. Better to use active verbs. Don't say, 'Climbing red roses are everywhere,' as you do here. Make them do something. Say 'the roses clamber up the trunk of the elm, and redden an arbor that creaks under their weight.' Do you get my meaning?" Is that great, or what? I loved this book.
The second one was the friendship that R.L.S. had with American writer, Henry James, who lived in Britain. Henry is the author of: The Turn of the Screw, Daisy Miller, The Wings of the Dove, and The Ambassadors. When R.L.S. lived in Bournemouth, England, the two great writers had many literary discussions in front of the fireplace. They had great respect for each other’s books.
The third part is when John Singer Sargent, the leading portrait painter of his time, comes to paint R.L.S.’s portrait. Sargent did include Fanny in the painting, but made her wear a white sari, sit in a chair against the wall barefooted, and with a fabric over her head so it partly concealed her face. After it was finished and hung in the sitting room, Fanny said on page 277, “I can’t stand it"..."The painting annoyed Fanny whenever it caught her eye. No one else would notice, but never had it been so obvious that she was being set out on the periphery.”
I know that I said three parts, but I forgot to tell you that since Treasure Island was originally published in a child’s magazine, Young Folks, R.L.S. had to come up with pirate curses that were not offensive to children, thus we have, “Shiver my timbers!”
The painting in question, courtesy of sphotos-e.ak.fbcdn.net:
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