Biographer of Fanny and Robert Louis Stevenson Uses a Novelist’s Tools To Portray Their Romance

Camille Peri is an evocative writer, and perhaps that is why so many reviewers have hailed this biography as one of the year’s best. The craving to be right there with Fanny has apparently seduced many readers.

Via Wikimedia Commons
Fanny Stevenson, 1885. Via Wikimedia Commons

‘A Wilder Shore: The Romantic Odyssey of Fanny and Robert Louis Stevenson’
By Camille Peri
Viking, 480 pages

If biographies seldom seem as deeply satisfying as fiction, as intense and intimate, it is because biographers cannot actually enter a character’s mind and reveal what no one but the character knows, thinks, and feels. On rare occasions this is not entirely so: In “The Making of Sylvia Plath,” for example, I had access to the underlinings and annotations in Plath’s books, and these come close to what she was experiencing as she read.

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