This Life I've Loved

Although much of Isobel Field’s autobiography is concerned with her stepfather, Robert Louis Stevenson, it is Isobel’s own unique story and her vibrant personality that will captivate the reader.
Belle Osbourne was born in Indiana; her early childhood was spent in the rough mining camps of Austin and Virginia City, Nevada; thence to school in San Francisco and Oakland; Antwerp, Belgium; painting and drawing in Julian’s atelier in Paris; three summers in Grez, France; back to Oakland and San Francisco and marriage to Joseph Strong, an artist; Hawaii and the brilliant court of King Kalakaua; an actors’ boardinghouse in Sydney, Australia; and Samoa.
Belle is a wonderful storyteller, and a writer of great wit and acuity. She was with her mother, Fanny (Frances Van de Grift Osbourne), when they met Stevenson in Grez in 1876; when Fanny and Louis married in 1880 in San Francisco, and at the Silverado sojourn; with the Stevensons in Hawaii in the late 1880s; and finally with them at Vailima in Samoa from 1890 until Stevenson’s death in 1894.
"If I had but a one-foot book shelf, This Life I’ve Loved would be always there, right between the Arabian Nights and Alice in Wonderland." — Gelett Burgess
"A great woman—a woman with a great brain and a great soul—who has lived as picturesque and colorful and useful a life as anyone I know." — Irwin S. Cobb