BELINDA LYONS-LEE The Haunting of Mr and Mrs Stevenson. Reviewed by Ann Skea

The new novel from the author of Tussaud imagines what might have inspired Robert Louis Stevenson to write Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

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? Have you ever watched it slide silently open …?

What if the wood of a wardrobe has the power to warp a mind? And lastly, what if I lied to Robert when I assured him that his nightmares about his wardrobe were nothing more than childish imaginings?

So thinks Fanny as she ponders her first meeting with Robert Louis Stevenson and the Frenchman Eugene Chantrelle, and wonders if a haunted wardrobe might have been the cause of the terrible events that followed.

Robert Louis Stevenson really did own a wardrobe made by the notorious Scottish criminal Deacon Brodie, and he really did have nightmares that he believed to be caused by it. He had also been introduced to Eugene Chantrelle, who was tried for murder in 1878, and they moved in the same social circles.

Both Brodie and Chantrelle were seemingly respectable citizens. Brodie was a well-established cabinet-maker and deacon of a trades guild; Chantrelle was an educated man who lived in Edinburgh with his wife and children, taught French to private pupils, and claimed to have been trained as a doctor in Strasbourg. It has been suggested that the double lives of these men were the inspiration for Stevenson’s story The Strange Tale of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

Belinda Lyons-Lee takes these facts and spins them into a spooky tale that begins with a séance, which Fanny (who is now Mrs Stevenson) describes with some horror and a certain degree of healthy scepticism.

The séance is conducted by Lady Jane Shelley, wife of Sir Percy Shelley whose deceased parents were the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary (née Wollstonecraft).

In a darkened parlour, Fanny and Robert (or Louis, as she also calls him) have already been shown the treasured death mask of Mary Shelley, along with a stuffed grizzly bear and various other strange objects. As they sit and join hands around a table in the conservatory, the ‘atmosphere’, as Fanny notes,

couldn’t have been any 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.

But it is not Mary Shelley who ‘inhabits’ Lady Shelley when she goes into a trance and begins automatically to transcribe a message from the dead. What she writes shocks Louis so badly that he leaps up and flees from the room. Fanny, too, is upset, not really believing in messages from the dead but concerned that Lady Shelley not only seems to know something about events she and Louis have kept private and ‘stoppered up’ inside them for the last seven years, but that she seems intent on getting Fanny to divulge these secrets.

In spite of her suspicion that Lady Shelley is faking her séances, further visits persuade Fanny she can share this secret that has been worrying her for so long. She begins to tell her story, describing everything that has led up to that first séance.

When she first met Louis in Grez, ‘an artists’ colony of sorts’ south of Paris, she was Mrs Osbourne, a married woman with children, who had left her philandering ‘scoundrel’ of a husband in America for the third time, and fled with their three children to Europe. There, she supported herself and the children by writing magazine articles. After the death from tuberculosis of her youngest son, Hervy, her Paris doctor had recommended Grez as somewhere to help her cope with her grief and soothe her shattered nerves. There, with her surviving son, Lloyd, at boarding school in Paris, she and her daughter, Isobel, would ‘follow our artistic inclinations and study painting formally’.

For Robert Louis Stevenson and three of his young friends, Grez was where they ‘sometimes sojourned for relaxation and inspiration’. On hearing that two scandalously unchaperoned women had become residents in the village and were ‘painting en plein air’ in what, as Fanny says, ‘was most decidedly a gentleman’s club’, two of Louis’ friends came to see ‘if we were creating a nuisance of ourselves and ruining the ambiance’. Hearing that ‘all was well’, Louis had joined them, and he and Fanny, in spite of the fact she was ten years older than him, developed ‘a deep affection’ for each other.

Fanny understood that Louis was recuperating from one of his frequent bouts of chest trouble and was currently struggling to write. Both were published writers and both had frequent bouts of self-doubt and low spirits.

[Louis] had bursts of jovial and carefree moods, but our long walks in the forest had revealed to me something of his inner life. As for most of us to more or less degree, what one saw on the surface was not necessarily indicative of what was inside. This concept of duality – 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.

This duality is true, too, of the Frenchman, Eugene Chantrelle, who arrives in Grez with his family and begins to monopolise Louis, who regards him as an old friend. Fanny, however, instinctively dislikes him. When she accompanies Louis to an extravagant dinner at the Chantrelle residence, she sees the dismissive way he treats his young wife, who is a similar age to Fanny’s daughter; and she responds acerbically to his subtle, conversational undermining of her own situation. There are other signs and gossip, too, that make Fanny suspect Chantrelle is not all he seems:

Despite Louis’ assurance, call it intuition or fancy, but I predicted that along with his young wife Elizabeth, Eugene Chantrelle would bring trouble to Grez.

Fanny is delighted when Louis suggests she accompany him to Edinburgh so he can show her his home town. Lloyd is away at school, and Isobel will be visiting a family in Antwerp, so she is free, and she wants time alone with Louis, away from Chantrelle’s constant demands on him. She agrees, provided they travel separately and live independently, that Louis observes the proprieties of escorting a married woman around Edinburgh and, to avoid any scandal that might upset her possible divorce proceedings, that they tell no-one.

Hardly have they arrived in Edinburgh, than Louis receives a note from Chantrelle saying he is bringing his family to Edinburgh and asking Louis to arrange accommodation and furnish it for them. It is then that Louis’ wardrobe seems again to spread its evil influence.

Fanny has already noticed its malign effects on Louis’ health. Living in his parents’ home while they are away, he again begins to have nightmares, dreaming that the wardrobe is whispering to him.

They decide to give the wardrobe to the Chantrelles, but in trying to move it, first Fanny’s finger somehow gets caught in the door, leaving spots of blood on the wood and making her dizzily aware of the sound of waves; then the top of the wardrobe falls on her foot:

This time I heard, almost as if just above the din of a noisy teashop, a woman whisper, ‘How did you get the key?’

In Chantrelle’s house, the wardrobe is moved into Eugene’s bedroom and he, too, has nightmares. He continues to monopolise Louis’ time, in spite of Louis’ failing health and the return of what Louis calls ‘Bloody Jack’: coughing up blood.

Fanny starts to befriend Elizabeth Chantrelle, who tells her she is afraid of her husband, who has taken out life insurance on her life, abuses her and threatens to poison her. Seeing Louis’ wardrobe in Eugene’s bedroom when she is visiting Elizabeth, who has been sick, Fanny feels compelled to look in it. She finds it full of medicines, including 30 bottles of chloral hydrate, which she fears Eugene plans to use to kill Elizabeth. Again, as she is closing the wardrobe drawer, the wardrobe attacks her and she hears a woman speak:

I felt the wardrobe’s dislike of me flowing through the knobs and up my arm, and I knew it would betray me the moment it could. … With a final thrust, the drawer gave way and slammed shut – my right finger caught within it.

Louis, meanwhile, has been visiting the seedy part of Edinburgh with Eugene and is wearing himself out writing furiously. Fanny does not tell Louis about the wardrobe and her fears; and the terrible things happen that she and Louis try to forget. Much later she and Louis regain the wardrobe and discover why it has been haunted.

As in Lyons-Lee’s earlier book, Tussaud, her interweaving of fact and fiction creates a fascinating and enjoyable tale, and The Haunting of Mr and Mrs Stevenson offers interesting background to both Fanny’s and Louis’ lives, to their marriage, and to the possible source of what became one of his most famous stories.

Belinda Lyons-Lee The Haunting of Mr and Mrs Stevenson Transit Lounge 2025 PB 368pp $34.99

Dr Ann Skea is a freelance reviewer, writer and an independent scholar of the work of Ted Hughes. She is author of Ted Hughes: The Poetic Quest (UNE 1994, and currently available for free download here). Her work is internationally published and her Ted Hughes webpages (ann.skea.com) are archived by the British Library.

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Tags: Belinda | Lyons-Lee, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Edinburgh, Eugene Chantrelle, Fanny Stevenson, ghosts, Grez, historical fiction, Lady Jane Shelley, literary history, Robert Louis Stevenson