Under the Wide and Starry Sky by Nancy Horan


This is a historical/biographical novel about two very lively and difficult personalities: the Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson and his tempestuous wife, Fanny deGrift Osbourne. It is a little slow at times but still a very interesting tale oft this well-known author and his colorful wife. I knew RLS wrote Treasure Island, Kidnapped, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and A Child's Garden of Verses, but I knew nothing about him as a person or about Fanny, and I found their individual lives and their life together fascinating. I also really enjoyed reading about the locations and the essence of the late artistic and literary 19th century times. Many times while reading this book I found myself going to google to learn more. I like when a book I'm reading leads me to the internet for further research and inspires me to read other books I've subconsciously avoided, both of which this account led me to do.
Reading a biographical novel about any author or real person is a win for me, but I would have enjoyed this even if the characters had been completely fictional. Nancy Horan's research is impeccable and she has brought it all together in an absorbing story about love, passion, personal struggle, creativity, and compassion. Robert Louis Stevenson had a frail constitution and like many of his contemporaries spent much of his life trying to run away from tuberculosis. He finally found peace in the Samoan Islands where he spent a few happy years, only to die from a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of 44 . He wrote the following much loved and oft-quoted poem in Samoa and was buried in the very place where he had finally felt well.

Under the wide and starry sky,
Dig the grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.
This be the verse you grave for me:
Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.

--"Requiem" by Robert Louis Stevenson


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