The haunting of Mr & Mrs Stevenson by Belinda Lyons-Lee

“Louis, you have the soul of a poet”: these are the words that appear in her automated writing when a spirit inhabits the person of Lady Jane Shelley at the seance that Robert Louis Stevenson and his wife Fanny attend in the Shelley home. Why these words seem horrific to both Louis and Fanny becomes one of the mysteries that unravel in Lyons-Lee’s latest novel set in the 19th century about the inspiration for his book ‘The strange case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’. Readers of Stevenson’s book will find this historical fiction account enthralling.

It begins with a haunted wardrobe, the wardrobe that frightened the impressionable Louis as a young boy, as he listened to the scary tales of his nurse Cummy. It’s a wardrobe that was crafted a century earlier by a notorious Scottish criminal, Deacon Brodie, and it’s posited that perhaps the wardrobe has absorbed the essence of its maker. He was a wealthy and respectable cabinet-maker who led a double life, stealing from his clients and murdering anyone who got in his way.

Augmented by the fevers and visions that are a side-effect of the ergotine drug that Stevenson takes for his tuberculosis, Louis becomes obsessed with the idea of the duality of man, an obsession that leads him to explore the dark underbelly of Edinburgh city as the location for his novel.

There is another duplicitous figure in his life, his ‘good friend’ Eugene Chantrelle, a manipulative figure that Fanny immediately mistrusted when she first made the acquaintance of Louis and his friends, when as an American woman fleeing her husband, she arrived in the artistic community of Grez in France. In their early romantic friendship, she continually warned Louis about Eugene’s behaviour, his callousness and his cloaked abusiveness to both her and his young wife Elizabeth.

All of these elements combine to create a dark mystery in their lives, a mystery that finds expression in the writings of both Louis and Fanny. Fanny is the narrator of Lyons-Lee’s novel, a unique figure of the times, as an adventurous revolver-carrying American woman, Louis’ “Wild Woman of the West’, ten years older than him, who with her three children has tried to separate from her husband three times, who supports herself with her published writing, and who dares to paint ‘en plein air’.

Lyons-Lee has combined thorough research of the times; the drugs, the scientific thinking, phrenology, spiritualism, status of women; and has crafted a gothic mystery of her own, one which fills in the background to Stevenson’s life and work, and is compelling reading for its own sake.

Themes: Robert Louis Stevenson, Deception, Serial killer, Murder, Spiritualism, Crime.

Helen Eddy