A Wilder Shore

A portrait of the fascinating, unusual and fruitful creative partnership of the writers Fanny and Robert Louis Stevenson

The romance between Fanny and Robert Louis Stevenson was an unlikely Victorian love story: he was an ambitious but drifting college-educated writer from a prominent family in Scotland; she was a forceful and determined farm girl from Indiana with a high school education. She was married, with children, and 10 years his senior when they met in France in 1876. How could a union between them work?

A Wilder Shore is a portrait of these two extraordinary people and a nuanced examination of the improbable union that stimulated, frustrated and ultimately sustained them. The book travels the world with the couple as they seek better health for him, a looser lifestyle and more creative freedom, beginning in an art colony outside Paris and ending in Samoa, where they lived and joined the native islanders’ fight for independence from imperialist powers. Along the way, the ferment of the Stevensons’ deeply loving but stormy marriage produced literary masterpieces by Robert such as Treasure Island, Kidnapped and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

This sweeping love story of Fanny and Robert Louis Stevenson and their search for freedom and self-discovery opens up new perspectives on both writers, as well as showing how astonishingly modern they were for their times.