Four years after the release of her debut novel Tussaud, Geelong author Belinda Lyons-Lee has launched her second book, The Haunting of Mr & Mrs Stevenson.
Lyons-Lee’s new offering is equal parts love story, mystery and fictional retelling of the genesis of Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic novel The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.
The tale evokes a gothic mood, with seances, haunted furniture, chain smoking and artistic obsession, set against the backdrop of the Victorian era.
Like many great stories, it came to Lyons-Lee while she was researching something else.
“I was working on another manuscript set in the 19th century, and I referred to Jekyll and Hyde,” she said.
“As I was writing about it, I thought, what is the back story with Robert Louis Stevenson?
“I knew he’d written Treasure Island, Kidnapped… and I thought, how do you go from writing these classic children’s stories to writing something pretty dark like Jekyll and Hyde?”
Lyons-Lee soon discovered a haunted wardrobe, Stevenson’s remarkable wife Fanny, a real life murder mystery and references to seances with Sir Percy Shelley and Lady Shelley.
“Tick, tick, tick, I’m right there; so many things to write about,” she said.
Told through the eyes of Fanny, an American divorcee who was 10 years older than Stevenson and a writer and artist in her own right, the novel is essentially about the duality of human nature.
“We have a tremendous capacity for infinite kindness and goodness, nobility and integrity, but also the opposite… wickedness, selfishness, greed and violence,” Lyons-Lee said.
“I’m drawn to this idea, as was Robert, that things and people aren’t always what they seem.”
Visit blyonslee.com to find out more.
