Fanny Stevenson: A Romance of Destiny
by: Alexandra Lapierre; Translator Carol Cosman

Hardcover. NY, Carroll & Graf, 1st, 1995, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 556 pages, b&w illustrations. In a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Robert Louis Stevenson's biographers are sharply divided over his American wife Frances (Fanny) Van de Grift (1840-1914), depicting her either as a muse, a saintly martyr or a dominating shrew. In this spellbinding biography, which is written like a romance novel, French novelist Lapierre portrays the Indiana-born farmer's daughter as an intrepid woman of rash energy, courage, violent emotion and charisma who sublimated her career as a painter in her possessive love for the tubercular Scottish novelist, children's writer and poet.