Our Samoan Adventure: With a Three-Year Diary by Mrs. Stevenson, Now Published for the First Time, Together with Rare Photographs from Family Albums

Dust jacket notes: "After more than sixty years of obscurity, this diary brings to light the mind and heart of the remarkable woman who shared Robert Louis Stevenson's last years on a South Sea Island. Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne, Stevenson's American wife, sailed with him from San Francisco in June, 1888. She was not to see America again until years after her husband's death, for on Samoa they found at last the only climate which meant life and comparative health for Louis. There in a house above the sea they lived for the remaining four years of his life, in a household which included Louis' mother, Fanny's two children by a former marriage, her son-in-law, and a retinue of Samoan servants. This exotic interlude has furnished the world of letters with one of its most romantic and popular legends. And Fanny herself has become the subject of much mystery and exaggerated conjecture. As her journal now clearly reveals, she was actually, as Charles Neider points out in his introduction, 'an unusual human being in her own right, frank as few are frank, courageous in the extreme, and...a writer in the best American traditions....' This is the record of a witty and valiant lady struggling with an alien environment, which included everything from volcanoes in the garden to Louis' political championing of a deposed native king - all with a contagious enjoyment. And through these pages rich in personality and event come the overtones of mutual concern and sympathy which made up that unusual marriage so few have understood until now...."