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By the time Thomas Stevenson died, in 1887, leaving his son financially independent, R.L.S. had acquired another intrusive minder, his wife Fanny Osbourne. Biographer McLynn clearly despises Fanny and her extensive family-which, at the time R.L.S. met her, included Belle, a spoiled 18-year-old daughter; Lloyd, a rotten 11-year-old son; and a useless, not-quite-divorced husband. Not all biographers have seen things this way, as McLynn admits, but he is persuasive. Fanny was 40 when they met, 10 years older than R.L.S., an artistic poseur given to spiritualism and hypochondria who tried to cut Stevenson off from his wide circle of literary friends and often acted as censor; she successfully bulldozed him into burning an offensive first draft of Dr. Jekyll.
The last dozen years of Stevenson's life saw him wandering with amazing optimism, usually accompanied by his mother, Fanny and her children, and a long-suffering maid whom Fanny abused. The quest was for a climate his bleeding lungs and Fanny's vapors could tolerate. He tried Davos in Switzerland, Saranac Lake in New York State, a deserted mining camp above California's Napa Valley, and finally Hawaii and the South Pacific. His pattern was to write (and drink, converse, hike and sail) to exhaustion and illness; Fanny's was marital chess playing, countering his real collapses with her vividly enacted imaginary ones.
When he settled for good, it was in Samoa, in a grand plantation house designed for large-scale entertaining. He wrote steadily, made more and more money, and happily or resignedly spent all of it keeping his deadbeat in-laws afloat. He died at 44, in 1894, having written his own requiem: "Under the wide and starry sky/ Dig the grave and let me lie/ Glad did I live and gladly die ..." McLynn tells his story with grace and skill, and only a dull reader will finish this biography without heading for the library to search out a complete edition of Stevenson's marvelous but now mostly unread short tales.