Book Review: ‘A Wilder Shore,’ by Camille Peri

[Pelican Press 0]

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

Book Review: ‘A Wilder Shore,’ by Camille Peri

She herself was tough as rawhide. Hailing from Indianapolis, the state capital but still not much more than a frontier town, she had married an unreliable charmer at 17 and accompanied him to the silver mines of Nevada, where he ******* to make a fortune and they shivered in a canvas and cardboard shanty. After a few years of tolerating her husband’s profligacy and infidelities, she made her escape, along with her children, studying art in Paris and then finding her way to the artists’ colony of Grez-sur-Loing, where she met Louis (as Peri refers to him), in France on his perennial pursuit of sunshine and health. Louis was enraptured with the battle-scarred, unsinkable ********* adventuress, a decade his senior.

Louis appeared to have tuberculosis but was never diagnosed with it. A credible posthumous diagnosis is bronchiectasis, which would have caused his frequent hemorrhages. His native Scotland provided the worst possible climate for him, with alleviation coming only from travel to warmer climes. Turning his back on the careers his solidly bourgeois Edinburgh father planned for him, first in the family lighthouse engineering firm and then in the law, he began his peregrinations in France, where he met Fanny in 1876; famously traveled with a donkey in the Cévennes; followed Fanny to California; and eventually honeymooned with her in a deserted Silverado mining camp.

After further travels through Europe and America the couple departed for the South Seas: Nuku Hiva, Fakarava, Tahiti, Hawaii, Micronesia, the Gilbert Islands and finally Samoa, where they bought 300 acres and created a cacao farm; Fanny’s extensive plantings would later become the nucleus of Samoa’s premier botanical garden, which can still be visited today. The Stevensons, passionate anti-imperialists, shed their Western ways and adopted local customs, becoming closely involved in regional politics, while Louis produced journalism and fiction at an almost frantic pace. During his four years in the country he wrote the now little-known but fascinating South Sea novels “The Ebb-Tide” and “The Beach of Falesá,” as well as the unfinished “Weir of Hermiston,” which he believed was the best work he had done to date.

Fanny’s writing has received scant attention from previous Stevenson biographers but Peri, co-editor of the essay collection “Mothers Who Think,” accords it respect. While she makes no exalted claims for Fanny’s literary gifts, she states that her stories “sit comfortably and creditably among those of other female magazine writers of her day,” and gives descriptions of Fanny’s plots that reveal a psychological sophistication and taste for the weird that is definitely allied with her husband’s aesthetic.

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

#Book #Review #Wilder #Shore #Camille #Peri

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

For verified travel tips and real support, visit: https://hopzone.eu/