Novel tells tale of American who married Robert Louis Stevenson

It’s hard to believe that it has been 6 1/2 years since the publication of Nancy Horan’s best-selling debut, Loving Frank, a riveting tale centered on Frank Lloyd Wright’s lover and muse, Mamah Borthwick Cheney.

In her new novel, Under the Wide and Starry Sky, Horan once again takes a deep, discerning dive into a famous man’s life by focusing on a significant love interest. Once again, readers will be enthralled.

Horan has been credited with inventing this popular subgenre of literary fiction, but few writers are as masterly as Horan at blending carefully researched history with the novelist’s art.

In Starry Sky, Horan aims her authorial laser at Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson and his lover and eventual wife, American Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne. As the story begins, Fanny, a married woman with three young children, is fleeing her cheating husband to study art in Europe. “ It’s one of the few respectable ways a woman can leave a rotten husband,” a friend tells her. Both Fanny and her daughter are talented painters, and Fanny also aspires to a writing career.

Denied admission to their chosen school in Antwerp, Belgium, because they are — horrors — women, Fanny and Belle (and Fanny’s two sons) move to Paris and study art while living on bare bones. Then the youngest child, Hervey, dies of tuberculosis. Overcome with grief and needing a cheap escape, the family moves to Grez-sur-Loing, a Bohemian riverside colony.

There Fanny meets not one but two Scots named Stevenson: Bob (Robert Louis’ cousin), introduced as wearing “trousers that ended at the knees, stockings with red and white horizontal stripes, and a smirk.” Robert Louis — called Louis or Lou — makes an even more remarkable entrance: Wearing a black velvet jacket, an embroidered felt smoking cap, a red sash, white linen pants and high boots, “He walked quickly to the house, pausing to consider each of the two doors. Rejecting both, he chose the open window. With the grace of a high jumper, he threw one long leg and then the other over the windowsill and hurled himself into the dining room.”

His friends call Louis the “Great Exhilarator.” Fanny, 10 years older than Louis but young in heart and mind, couldn’t help noticing.

The admiration is mutual, but their love builds slowly. Once the sparks rise to flames, Fanny divorces Evil Husband and marries Louis, who begins tinkering with Treasure Island when Fanny’s son Sammy asks him to “tell me a pirate story.”

The Stevensons’ way was rarely easy. Louis battled with both his writing and his health. Fanny suffered from bouts of what sound like migraines and bipolar disorder. She envied Louis’ literary success, and she resented his friends.

Horan’s prose is gorgeous enough that it would keep a reader transfixed even if the story weren’t so compelling.