Under the Wide and Starry Sky by Nancy Horan

"Under the wide and starry sky,
Dig the grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.

This be the verse you grave for me:
Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from the sea,
And the hunter home from the hill."
            -Robert Louis Stevenson

This is the second novel by Nancy Horan. I read her first, Loving Frank, last month. It's rather strange that the last three novels I have read have been biographical, each one about a woman who loved a famous man. It wasn't intentional to read them almost back to back. Frank Lloyd Wright was Mamah Cheney's lover in Loving Frank. Our Page Turners group read The Paris Wife by Paula McLain in May, about the first wife of Ernest Hemingway, Hadley. And this one, as you can tell from the quote, has Robert Louis Stevenson as the love interest and second husband of Fanny Van de Grift Osborne Stevenson.

I knew very little about Robert Louis Stevenson. I was familiar with Treasure Island and A Child's Garden of Verses but didn't even realize that he was a Scotsman, educated as a lawyer, or that he wrote The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. I remembered quite fondly one of his poems in a textbook I used years ago, called "The Block City." Stevenson was troubled by serious respiratory problems all his life and died quite young. He apparently gave Fanny a lot of credit for extending his life by being his health advocate in many ways, one of which was agreeing to live aboard ship for months at a time, even though she suffered terribly from seasickness while his illness was much improved by sea air. She gave up her aspirations to study art when she met Robert and found difficulty being accepted as the writer she felt she could be. They lived in many places, trying to find the perfect place for Robert to thrive and ended up in Samoa, a place he greatly loved.

I enjoyed this book but I didn't love it. I would give it a 3+ since I appreciate Ms. Horan's writing. Maybe by the time I got to this novel, I was just tired of reading about women in the shadows of great men! On to a mindless mystery, perhaps!