Why a Booktrail?
1970s – 1890s: The story behind Robert Louis Stevenson
Under the Wide and Starry Sky
What you need to know before your trail
At the age of thirty-five, Fanny van de Grift Osbourne has left her philandering husband in San Francisco to set sail for Belgium to study art, with her three children and nanny in tow. Not long after her arrival, however, tragedy strikes, and Fanny and her brood repair to a quiet artists’ colony in France where she can recuperate. There she meets Robert Louis Stevenson, ten years her junior, who is instantly smitten with the earthy, independent, and opinionated belle Americaine.
Locations
Reset- Scotland - Edinburgh
- A: 6 Howard Place
- B: 17 Heriot Row
- C: Royal Infirmary Edinburgh
- France
- D: Grez
- America/USA - CA
- E: Monterey - The Stevenson House
- Belgium
- G: Antwerp harbour
Travel Guide
Travel BookTrail style to the locations of Under the Wide and Starry Sky
Travel the world with Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny van de Grift Osbourne from France to Samoa
Even after meeting him in France, Fanny does not immediately take to the young lawyer who longs to devote his life to literature rather than the law – and who would eventually write such classics as Treasure Island and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. In time, though, she succumbs to Stevenson’s charms, and the two begin a fierce love affair-marked by intense joy and harrowing darkness that spans decades as they travel the world for the sake of his health.
Stevenson traveled widely and it was one of his journeys – a canoe voyage in Belgium and France with Sir Walter Simpson, a friend from the Speculative Society where he travelled to Gez and met Fanny. In June 1888, Stevenson chartered the yacht Casco and set sail with his family from San Francisco. In 1890, Stevenson purchased land of some 400 acres (1.6 km²) in Upolu, an island in Samoa where he set and his family up on an estate in the village of Vailima. He is buried near Mount Vaea.
Stevenson is buried with the following words on his grave:
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 sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.
BookTrail Boarding Pass: Under the Wide and Starry Sky
Destination: Edinburgh, Antwerp, Grez, Samoa Author/guide: Nancy Horan Departure Time: 1970s – 1890s
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