Karen Steele

The Love Affair Karen Steele

Set in the last half of the 19th C this is a fictionalised biography of the love story between a writer with an eccentric way of life and an older married woman. Fanny Osbourne, a woman of confused determination, brave in her outlook but uncertain of her needs, is married with three children and living in California. She tires of her husband's philandering and leaves, taking the children to Paris so her daughter can study art. After months of difficulties and extreme devastation she meets Louis, a penniless man with ill-health and a steady determination to become a successful writer. The Parisian bohemian society in which they mix counters the moral attitudes of the day; another man's wife and ten years older? Two years of a tumultuous and passionate affair pass before she has fears and doubts and leaves him to return to her husband full of remorse and hope for her marriage. She leaves behind her devastated lover, who after a year of ill-health and distress decides he has to go to California and find her. He realises he has little hope, little to offer but love and the fact that he may have to face her secure and happy with her husband, whilst he in may well die on the journey.