During his many travels in search of health, Stevenson gathered not only a literary fame but also an extended family of hangers-on. Years of restless wandering in Europe and the US (California, Saranac Lake, New York, Hawaii) led him finally to tropical Samoa, where he found not only wellbeing, but a release of the passionate potential that had been in him from his chilly beginnings in Edinburgh. What might have been a veritable paradise in his last years, however, was marred by the eccentric behaviour of his wife, California-born Fanny Osbourne. As he came into his own, she retreated into paranoia. Yet such was his loyalty to her that he allowed himself to be trapped in a situation that grew more untenable.