Malevolent: The strange case of Mr and Mrs Stevenson
Author Belinda Lyons-Lee gives us the back story to the man who wrote the Gothic horror novella The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
Belinda Lyons-Lee is drawn to writing about the macabre and to storytelling that merges fact and fiction. Her debut novel Tussard was based on the life of Madame Marie Tussaud, who was forced to make wax death masks of those guillotined during the French Revolution.
Her latest novel, The Haunting of Mr and Mrs Stevenson, also airs shadowy themes, and ingeniously interweaves fantasy and fact. Scrupulously researched, the narrative charts a relationship between (Robert) Louis Stevenson and Fanny Stevenson. Set in 19th-century Europe, in particular Grez-sur-Loing in France and Edinburgh in Scotland, it’s a milieu of spiritists, bonnets and big skirts, taxidermied bears, flickering oil lamps and hansom cabs.
The Gothic story begins with a seance led by Lady Jane Shelley, married to Sir Percy Shelley, whose parents were the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and writer Mary Wollstonecraft: “It couldn’t have been more perfect for a haunting, if that’s what this was to be. The candlelight at the centre of the table reflected in the huge mirror behind us, bouncing back onto the conservatory windows so that endless replicas of the four of us hovered in the wavering light.”
Exquisitely eerie, the plotting conjures foreboding in the vein of Wilkie Collins and Arthur Conan Doyle. Influenced by these writers, Lyons-Lee plumbs the dark seams of human nature.
Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone features a cursed diamond, while this yarn involves a spooky wardrobe. C.S. Lewis’s cabinet in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe may have been a portal into Narnia, but the featured furniture in this novel – crafted by the notorious Scottish criminal Deacon Brodie who had a respectable public persona as a deacon of a trades guild – is the stuff of nightmares: Have you ever looked closely at your wardrobe in the dark? Have you ever lain in bed, perhaps with the candle flickering on your bedside table, and heard it creak – groan even?”
Louis Stevenson and Fanny are in love and defy convention. Separated from her philandering husband, Fanny is not yet divorced. Unusually, for those times, she’s outspoken, an astute intellectual who supports herself through writing.
Loving and resilient, Fanny has infinite patience for the vulnerable and consumptive Stevenson, who regularly pushes himself into a state of fevered exhaustion either triggered by socialising with the charming yet manipulative Eugene Chantrelle or through prolonged bouts of intense writing. Arguably, the all too frequent incidences of Stevenson’s ill health are overplayed and diminish his character.
the idea that conflicting forces of good and evil coexist in an individual is especially scrutinised
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Fanny suspects Chantrelle hides a sociopathic nature behind a mask of affable gentility. Dualism is a pervasive theme alluded to initially in reference to Deacon and explored in more depth through Louis and Fanny Stevenson. She says, “the capacity of each of us to experience two sometimes opposing and conflicting emotions, desires or instincts at once was one on which we talked often.”
However, the idea that conflicting forces of good and evil coexist in an individual is especially scrutinised through the author’s portrayal of the real-life murder mystery involving Chantrelle, which is believed to be the inspiration behind Stevenson’s masterpiece, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
Engagingly told in Fanny’s voice, the writing is persuasive and the couple’s Bohemian lifestyle convincingly drawn. Overall, an enjoyable read for a cold and wintry day but not for a dark night if you have malevolent furniture.
The Haunting of Mr and Mrs Stevenson by Belinda Lyons-Lee, Transit Lounge, $34.99
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