Fanny Stevenson

First published in France where it caused a literary sensation and became an instant bestseller, this is Alexandra Lapierre's celebrated, award-winning biography of Robert Louis Stevenson's wife. One hundred years after his death, Robert Louis Stevenson, author of such classic novels as Treasure Island and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, remains an ever fascinating figure. This is the remarkable story of his wife Fanny, the American woman eleven years his senior who influenced every facet of his life and work, and who remains in her own right one of the most truly independent and free-spirited women of her generation. Stevenson was to devote his life to this woman: he crossed continents in search of her; scandalized his family to marry her; built a life in the Pacific with her; survived tuberculosis because of her; and was encouraged and inspired in his writing by her. He was an unknown twenty-five year old Scotsman when he came across Fanny for the first time in the artists' colony of Barbizon near Paris. A mother of three, Fanny had left her unfaithful husband to come to Europe with her three children to learn how to paint. No greater abyss could have separated the young Stevenson from