Sex and Lies Before Videotape : Writing and rewriting women’s lives : FANNY STEVENSON: A Romance of Destiny, <i> By Alexandra Lapierre</i> . <i> Translated by Carol Cosman (Carroll & Graf: $26; 520 pp.)</i>

In recent years, writing about women who are known largely because of their famous husbands or lovers has become a burgeoning field. In traditional biographies of their male partners, women like Zelda Fitzgerald, Alma Mahler, Frieda Lawrence, Nora Barnacle (wife of James Joyce) or Lou Andreas Salome (Nietzsche’s lover and one of Freud’s first analysands) were either misunderstood or maligned. Feminist biographers and historians are now documenting the fact that these women were often extremely influential--if not partners--in their mates’ creative process.

Feminist biographers have also pointed out that for women in the past deferred status was often the only kind available. Because of traditional gender roles, the woman who acted as muse to her husband or lover’s creativity often had limited opportunity of her own to write, paint or invent. For such women, the construction of relationships served as a substitute for the literary, artistic or scientific enterprise. Emotion, domesticity, or reproduction was their pen and paper. Historians and biographers thus owe them at least a portion of the attention they have devoted to their mates.

French author Alexandra Lapierre clearly wants to join the company of the distinguished biographers who have rescued other mates of “great men” from invisibility or ignominy. Her book on Fanny Stevenson--a bestseller in its original French--was inspired by the tendency of Robert Louis Stevenson’s biographers to treat his wife as little more than a malicious, meddling harridan.

According to Lapierre, Fanny was no such thing. As Lapierre imagines her--and imagine is the operative word here--she was a true American original: the adventure novelist’s wife as dashing, intrepid adventurer--a 19th-Century version of the modern liberated woman.

Unfortunately, readers will find little in the factual record to support this view. Written more like a romance novel than a serious biography, “Fanny Stevenson: A Romance of Destiny” appears to invent much of the character and personality attributed to Fanny Stevenson, who nevertheless emerges as a distinctly unpleasant figure.

Lapierre spends at least a third of the book talking about Fanny’s life before she met Stevenson. The book’s initial sections follow Fanny as leaves her native Indiana to travel around the Isthmus of Panama. She undertakes this arduous journey in order to join her first husband, Samuel Osborne, who had gone West to make his fortune. The trip was hardly worth it. Osborne, with whom she had three children, proved to be an unrepentant womanizer. After several attempts at reconciliation, Fanny took her children and went to Paris. She tried to become a painter and then, in 1876, she met and fell in love with Robert Louis Stevenson, who was then in his late 20s.

Fanny was 11 years older than Stevenson. She eventually divorced her first husband (although Osborne tried to prevent it), married the tubercular writer and moved with him to his native Scotland. They traveled to Hawaii and then to Samoa. Although Stevenson longed to return to England, he fell seriously ill during a visit to Australia, and was told that returning to the cold and damp would kill him. According to Lapierre, it was Fanny’s ministrations that kept Stevenson alive--and writing--for 20 years. After he finally died in Samoa, Fanny moved back to San Francisco, where she met and lived with a man almost four decades her junior. When she died at 73, he married her 56-year-old daughter Belle.

Given the facts of this life, Lapierre presumably had some impressive material to work with. But she fails to illuminate the relationship that is the book’s raison d’e ^ tre-- the “romance of destiny” between Fanny and Robert Louis Stevenson. Apart from their courtship, Lapierre’s account of their lives doesn’t suggest much of a romance. Quite the opposite. At the end of his life, Fanny’s daughter became Stevenson’s secretary and, far from welcoming Belle’s help, Fanny was desperately jealous of the relationship. She was also angered and frustrated by Stevenson’s support of native Samoans in their struggles against European colonizers. Their years together seemed to have been filled with tension. While Lapierre describes the sturm und drang , she does nothing to examine or understand the underlying causes.

A more skilled biographer also would certainly have explored and better explained Fanny’s complex relationship to her daughter. Belle Strong--nee Osborne--seems to have idealized the father her mother came to abhor. She eventually became a rival for the affections of her ailing stepfather and then actually married Fanny’s last companion. What wonderful grist this could have provided for a biographer’s analytical mill!

Instead of scholarly research and perceptive analysis, what we get in “Fanny Stevenson: A Romance of Destiny” is a narrative account that resembles a Harlequin romance novel. The book abounds with passages like the following about one of Fanny’s encounters with her first husband: “Huddling against him, she kept her eyes closed, her forehead raised, her lips against the neck of the man she loved. She breathed in the special softness of this place, of Sam’s flesh, the wonderfully silky, warm skin, the regular pulsing of blood in the veins, the leather and honey of his tobacco, Sam’s special smell. Under the unfamiliar beard, she felt Sam’s lips brush hers: furtive kiss like a warm wave washing over her.”

Similarly, Lapierre conveys much of her information in long passages of dialogue. We listen to Fanny arguing with her first husband, berating her daughter and admonishing Stevenson himself. For good reason, this technique is controversial when used by authors like Bob Woodward and Joe McGinnes in a book about figures who are alive. The way Lapierre puts words in the mouths of people who have been dead for almost a century has even less credibility.

Occasionally Lapierre does rely on her subjects’ correspondence or diary entries. This provides the biography’s only literary relief. Robert Louis Stevenson was, of course, a wonderful writer. And Fanny’s private communications demonstrate a better mastery of language than her biographer displays, even in translation. One wishes that Lapierre had simply collected their letters and allowed them to speak for themselves.

In her title, Lapierre borrows the phrase Stevenson and his wife used to describe their relationship. The author has a responsibility to explore that premise, not to simply get swept up in it herself. Indeed, if Lapierre had given the reader more history and less romance, she might have succeeded in bringing Fanny Stevenson to life.