Nancy Horan

Thoroughly enjoyable read that highlights the life of one woman in the early 20th century who was torn between being a wife and mother or spending her life with the brilliant, volatile man she fell in love with, Frank Lloyd Wright, and pursuing her own intellectual interests. This book is extremely well written and propels you into the moral dilemmas faced by Wright's mistress.

This book is a fictional account of the lives of Robert Louis Stevenson and his wife Fanny, told from her perspective. I’ve tried unsuccessfully to read Treasure Island, and really don’t have any great desire to read his books. Even so, this book was fascinating! It explored his very sickly life and his very independent wife who quite literally saved him by taking to the high seas despite her awful sea sickness. And it’s a story of Fanny’s own traumatic life experiences and show more frightening health scare. Ultimately, moving again and again to find a place where RLS will not just survive but thrive, they build a home in Samoa. This was a well-written and very interesting novel that I highly recommend even for those who are not RLS fans. show less

Under the Wide and Starry Sky - Nancy Horan
4 stars

“Did all women married to well-known men struggle for recognition? It occurred to him that his friends thought her greatest achievement was keeping him alive. They didn't care about her other qualities.”

The romance of Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny van de Grift Osbourne has a legendary and appropriately poetic beginning. The young Stevenson caught a glimpse of the woman through a window, fell in love at first sight, and climbed through show more the window to join her at dinner with his friends. The reality of their relationship was naturally much more complex. It makes a good story and I think Nancy Horan tells is fairly well.

It’s hard to imagine a more difficult and unlikely relationship. Fanny was married, but separated from her unfaithful husband. She was grieving the death of her youngest child while caring for two other children. Louis was 15 years younger and financially dependent on his disapproving father. He was an unpublished, aspiring author. He was fighting and slowly, painfully, losing a battle with tuberculosis. She was hiding recurring mental illness. And yet, they married. And he wrote, among other things, Treasure Island, , and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

Horan’s book is not a definitive biography, but she made these historical figures come alive for me. She is writing about an unusual marriage, mostly from Fanny’s perspective. As with the story of Mamah Cheney and Frank Lloyd Wright, she is looking at the problems faced by a divorced woman in a time when divorce was not common. The Stevenson’s lives were a travelogue as they looked for a climate that would help to maintain Louis’ health. Always moving and facing one crisis after another, Fanny is also frustrated by a lack of recognition for her own creativity. Louis is sometimes the self-involved egotistical artist and other times a sensitive, concerned, husband and father.

It is fantastic that they ended up in Samoa, of all places, almost like an adventure story. How appropriate. show less

Found this tale of the life of Mamah Borthwick Cheney, mistress to Frank Lloyd Wright, disappointing. Is it a human thing to expect extraordinary lives to be lived by extraordinary people, or just an American thing? As portrayed by author, Mamah never feels remotely extraordinary. She’s a woman who was willing to defy some social taboos (leaving husband for lover) but not others (continues to insist she’s dedicated to her children … though she doesn’t attempt to see them for years at show more a time); she graduates from college (not common for women at turn of the century) but never really does anything with her degree/learning; she rubs shoulders with radical thinkers (Ellen Keyes, Goethe) but never adds anything meaningful to these movements; and she spends years in an intimate relationship with Wright without ever having any noticeable impact on his philosophy or art. Pretty much all that distinguishes her is her rather spectacular death at the end. Note that I said “as portrayed by the author,” because we can’t really know if Mamah was this uninteresting – that’s just how Nancy Horan depicts her. A part of me wonders to what extend Mamah’s true “radicalism” is blunted by Horan’s desire to portray her as a sympathetic figure. If this had been an autobiography rather than a biography, would we have liked Mamah less but admired her more?

Another major disappointment is what I call the “evening news effect.” Due to the limited amount of primary source info available (Horan stipulates to just how little in an important endnote), Horan apparently has attempted to flesh out the story by dumping everything she turned up in the course of her research into the story, no matter how irrelevant. Thus we are forced to endure scenes, pages, chapters of information (she planted a garden! her daughter was constipated on the train to Colorado!) that add neither to the story nor our understanding of Mamah’s character.

Perhaps the most distracting flaw (for me), however, was the lack of insight that the book provided into Frank Lloyd Wright’s career. Sadly, Borthwick’s life intersected the famous architects’ during what were probably the most fallow years of his career – after his vision was already shaped but before he began building some of his most spectacular edifices. We end up learning more about Wright’s sideline buying and selling Japanese prints than we do of his architectural career. As depicted by the author, Wright comes off as rather whiny, spoiled, and overbearing … but, again, to what extent is this perception shaped by the intent and/or prose of the author? There’s no way to know.

Ultimately, found myself resenting the fact that such an extraordinary life (wealthy, educated, travelled the world, hobnobbed with influential people) was wasted on such an ordinary woman. Would have been a much more exciting life, not to mention a much more exciting book, if Mamah had taken more advantage of the opportunities that her life afforded her. show less