The Haunting of Mr & Mrs Stevenson: Belinda Lyons-Lee in-conversation with Sally Colin-James

Before Jekyll and Hyde, there was someone else …

The Haunting of Mr and Mrs Stevenson is a gothic delight. It tells the story of Robert Louis Stevenson’s friendship with the charming Eugene Chantrelle and the murder mystery that contributed to Robert’s need to create a novel focused on the dualistic nature of the psyche.

From a séance with the Shelleys at Boscombe Manor to a haunted wardrobe made by an infamous Scottish criminal, the novel is underscored by the story of two writers very much in love. Fanny and Robert were married in 1880, when she was forty and he was twenty-nine. An American who divorced her philandering husband to marry Robert, she was already the mother of children, a self-supporting writer, and with intelligence and wit very much the rock in their relationship.

Brilliantly told in Fanny’s voice, this atmospheric novel is both the story of an unconventional…