Belinda Lyons-Lee has a taste for the macabre. Her previous book, Tussaud, was set in 1810 and focused on the titular, renowned Marie Tussaud – the creator of death masks and wax sculptures – and how she became involved in making a human-size girl automaton. It was a strange and eerie mishmash of fact and fiction. Lyon’s-Lee latest book, The Haunting of Mr & Mrs Stevenson is once again an historical work that blends the real and the fantastic.
Its central conceit is a delicious one and Lyons-Lee corrals as many Gothic tropes as possible – including a seance with the Shelleys, a life-size bust of Mary Wollstonecraft and a malevolent wardrobe made by a criminal – to explore the provenance of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Where did the Scottish author find the inspiration for this classic psychological tale of dual good/evil personalities?
From an artistic colony in Paris to the atmospheric gloom of Edinburgh, the book is written from the perspective of Fanny, Stevenson’s wife, and an American divorcee who’s proficient, among other things, at revolver-wrangling (he fondly calls her his “wild woman of the west”). Not just a bauble adjunct to the famous author, Fanny is a writer and artist too, though unfortunately she’s living at a time when women struggled for independence – and to be considered as seriously as creatives as their male counterparts. Even painting en plein air unchaperoned by men was considered scandalous.
The Haunting of Mr & Mrs Stevenson: solidly drawn characters
Fanny’s a solidly drawn character nonetheless and an outsider in many ways (her nationality, her gender, the fact that she supports herself and her children by her pen). We occupy her headspace as she tries to navigate a world dominated by louche bohemians and patronising men of letters, with intelligence and wit.
According to this novel, it was the pair’s meeting with the creepy Eugene Chantrelle and his dutiful wife Elizabeth, as well as their encounters with a nightmare-inducing wardrobe, that ultimately inspired Stevenson’s book about the duality of human nature and conflicting psyches struggling for dominance in the one soul.
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For those who like to be transported into an 1880s world of cobblestones, Spiritualism and hansom cabs, Lyons-Lee’s literary mystery is an enjoyable mix of research and imagination.
The Haunting of Mr & Mrs Stevenson, Belinda Lyons-Lee
Publisher: Transit Lounge
ISBN: 9781923023338
Format: Paperback
Pages: 368pp
Release date: 1 July 2025
RRP: $34.99
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