'A Wilder Shore' charts the course of a famous bohemian marriage

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A Wilder Shore / Penguin Random House

As a portrait of a marriage, it’s bizarre. I’m talking about the dual portrait John Singer Sargent painted in 1885 of Fanny and Robert Louis Stevenson.

Louis, whose first novel, Treasure Island, had been published two years earlier, is captured pacing in a darkened room. Tall and thin, Louis looks every inch like an "insane stork," which is how fellow writer Henry Adams described him. Louis stares out beyond the confines of the portrait at us, the viewers, as if to share an idea he’s just had.

Fanny sits barefoot on a chair at the opposite end of the room, all but shrouded, like a piece of furniture, in a golden Indian sari. No fool, Fanny recognized Sargent’s depiction as yet another attempt by an admirer of her husband’s to diminish her. “I am but a cipher under the shadow,” she complained to Sargent.

Camille Peri’s lively and substantive dual biography of the Stevensons, called A Wilder Shore, whisks those obscuring draperies off Fanny and restores her to full personhood. But, Peri aims for something even more ambitious than a feminist recovery of a mostly forgotten wife of a famous writer. In her “Introduction,” Peri describes her book as: “an intimate window into how [the Stevensons] lived and loved — a story that is at once a travel adventure, a journey into the literary creative process, and, I hope, an inspiration for anyone seeking a freer, more unconventional life.”

“Inspiration” is something of a quaint term these days in lit crit circles and, yet, it’s always been an abiding draw of biographies. Speaking for myself, after reading A Wilder Shore, I’m inspired to do two things: I want to reread Robert Louis Stevenson’s three great works of fiction: Treasure Island, Kidnapped and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. And, I want to schedule a séance with Fanny to get some one-on-one instruction on how to live more fearlessly as a woman.

Peri opens A Wilder Shore with a scene that could have been written by Louis but, instead, was lived by Fanny: In the summer of 1875, she and her three children and their governess rushed aboard a train in San Francisco to cross the country and catch a ship in New York harbor that would carry them to Belgium.

This was no pleasure trip: To reach their destination the little band rode a wagon through floodwaters, but Fanny was desperate to escape her humiliating marriage to a prospector who lived openly with his mistress. With the little money she’d earned by sewing, Fanny planned to enroll herself and her teenaged daughter in art school.

Hurtling into the unknown put the 36-year-old, still-married mother of three in the orbit of Robert Louis Stevenson — a sickly Scottish writer who was 10 years her junior. It was love at first sight, at least for Louis. Peri says that:

Fanny likely saw their affair as something that could not last. For him, though, sexual intimacy with Fanny was not simply a romp with an older woman. It cemented his emotional commitment to her — a kind of role reversal that is striking for a Victorian man.

Peri details how the bohemian relationship that evolved between Fanny and Louis included other such gender role reversals: The frail “Louis was what the Scots call a “handless” man,” she writes. During the couple’s honeymoon spent squatting in an abandoned silver mine in California, it was Fanny who “out of scraps of wood and packing crates ... nailed together furniture.” Of course, the Stevensons’ union caused dismay among Louis’ friends who disparaged Fanny for her age, her American-ness, her short hair and cigarette smoking, and, most virulently, her olive skin.

As convincing as she is about the progressive relationship between the Stevensons, Peri is also clear-eyed about the fact that Fanny still got the somewhat shorter end of the stick. While Louis respected Fanny as his best critic, he also assumed she would handle the mundane household routine and provide nursing care.

Louis’ undiagnosed illness — he chronically coughed up blood — did have the “upside” of broadening the couple’s life through travel in search of a healthier climate. They spent their final years together before Louis’ death in 1894 at the age of 44, in Samoa. Fanny lived on for 20 more years, writing, traveling and attracting male protégés. No doubt her contemporaries derided her for that, too; but, thanks to Peri’s vivid biography, Fanny has the last fearless laugh.