Similar Faces

I turned off my Kindle, feeling a bit sad that the story had ended. Under the Wide and Starry Sky by Nancy Horan had kept me busy for the past week. When I began reading I thought the story was about a woman fleeing an abusive husband. She is running away with her three children but it also became the story of the life of Robert Louis Stevenson, the author. Robinson Crusoe and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde are a couple of his better known stories.

The more I read, the more interesting the lives of Stevenson and his wife, Fannie Van de Grift Osbourne became as they loved, argued and traveled. I was not aware that he was an ill man or that she suffered from mental illness. In fact, I did not know much about either one of them. After reading the book and becoming intrenched in their lives, I wanted to know more. Each character is easy to picture by Horan's descriptions and the mood of the times is very evident. Friendships come and go and jealousy seemed to reign among the many artists. Fannie was also an artist, but the time she lived in seems to have kept her from writing.
Stevenson and his artistic friends also kept her from developing her own writing skill. After Stevenson's death she did publish a few things.

 It seems that they were ahead of their times, doing things that could be objectionable to others, yet they seem to move from love to anger to despair and back to love. Words are very important in how they speak to each other and the wrong word could send one or both into fits of depression. The world traveling, due to Stevenson's health, is like a travel log. Where they end up in Samoa, a tropical paradise, sounds both beautiful as well as awful and disgusting!

Though the book's main characters are Stevenson and Fannie, I got glimpses of their family and friends by Horan's descriptions. Stevenson was forty-four when he died and is buried at Vailima in the South Pacific.
From knowing nothing about Stevenson and his wife, I now feel as if I understand their relationship, his struggles in writing, her hurts and anger, and the love they had for each other. The book is considered a historical novel and Horan made the story interesting interspersed with facts!

When I saw a picture of Stevenson, he reminded me of some of my relatives with the mustache and the clothing.