Barbara’s Pick
December 2015
Under the Wide and Starry Sky
Nancy Horan
Whenever I’m looking for a new book to read, I’m attempting to access the formula History + Prose = Delight. In historical fiction I get the best of both worlds: I learn something (or more about something I knew a little about), and I savor a writer’s relationship with language.
Under the Wide and Starry Sky tells the love story of British author Robert Louis Stevenson and his American wife, Fanny van de Grift Osbourne. She escaped a philandering husband in California by packing up her children and moving to Paris to study painting. Louis, as Stevenson was known, met her at an artist’s colony in France and was smitten. Fanny, older than he by ten years, took longer to return his admiration. Once united, however, they began an important literary partnership that lasted until his death. All of Stevenson’s major works were written after they married, and he considered her his most important sounding board.
Horan’s first book, Loving Frank, was a best-selling historical novel about Frank Lloyd Wright and his mistress Mamah Borthwick Cheney. Horan masterfully tells Louis and Fanny’s story—Louis’s near-debilitating respiratory illness and Fanny’s drawn-out divorce and other family tragedies.
I didn’t know much about Stevenson and knew nothing about his wife. They turned out to be compelling people worthy of being fictional characters. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and look forward to the next one!