ROBERT Louis Stevenson wrote almost 3000 letters. He is the subject of numerous biographies and a website organised and maintained by Edinburgh Napier University. There are journals and conferences in his name and events in his honour. In short, finding a new angle on RLS is no easy feat.

Journalist Jeremy Hodges deserves kudos, then, for focusing on the relatively neglected relationship between RLS and his cousin Katharine de Mattos. This neglect exists despite the fact that Stevenson dedicated Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde to Katharine and tagged on some un-Hyde like poetry including the lines “Still we will be the children of the heather and the wind / Far away from home, O it’s still for you and me”.

Hodges traces their relationship to the teenage years that they shared in Scotland and to one episode in particular. Close to Neidpath Castle in the Scottish Borders, “the youngsters lay down together on a bed of wild blueberries to read the adventures of the highwayman Dick Turpin …” From there Hodges has Katherine embark on a lifetime of love for Stevenson while he, in return, felt a “fond affection” for her.

While the teenagers lay at Neidpath, Katherine’s father Alan, renowned builder of lighthouses, lay paralysed in Portobello and soon to die; a victim of multiple sclerosis or, perhaps, syphilis contracted as a result of indiscretions in his younger days. Katharine, as they say, did not have her troubles to seek. Later she would marry Sydney de Mattos, a Fabian socialist, adulterer and perpetual threat to her finances.

Like Stevenson, Katharine was a writer though, unlike him, not a very good one. Another possible explanation for the dedication advanced by Hodges is that Jekyll and Hyde was inspired by a short story of hers entitled “Through the Red-Litten Windows”. It tells of a young man lured into an experiment where a body is vaporised and its spirit released into another. The general theme of duality, Hodges surmises, could have inspired Stevenson’s classic tale.

There are some issues with both parts of this thesis. Unlike Prince Charles, Hodges never asks what “in love” means, but simply insists that Katharine was in love with Stevenson from her teenage years onwards. And if Stevenson was fond of her, he sometimes had strange ways of demonstrating it. His early advice to Katharine was that she “was writing with gloves on just now; you must learn to write with the quick of your fingers. If you persevere, you will learn and well.” As it turned out, the gloves never came off and he seemed reluctant to promote her writing even when he was in a position to do so. In a poem recalling their teenage years, he described her as “a strong and bitter virgin, sharp as a blueberry” which doesn’t sound much like the language of love.

Whatever the nature of the relationship, it broke down irrevocably over a story published by Stevenson’s wife Fanny called “The Nixie”. Mutual friend William Ernest Henley, poet, editor and model for Long John Silver, complained to Stevenson that the story was based on an idea that Katharine had previously expressed. Katharine’s attempts to stay out of the argument proved bootless and Stevenson treated her with uncommon harshness; in the process earning the “Cousin Hyde” sobriquet of the book’s title.

STEVENSON’S treatment of Katharine resulted in estrangement but he is not the only man to have over-reacted in defence of his wife and the “Cousin Hyde” denouncement seems a bit excessive. In fact, Hopkins is overly-free with the Jekyll and Hyde label throughout the book, laying it indiscriminately on feckless drunks and devils incarnate. There were certainly characters in Stevenson’s orbit who were all Hyde and no Jekyll, including his erstwhile drinking companion Eugene Chantrelle, a rapist and murderer who was hung in Calton Jail. But none that strictly represented the kind of duality found in Jekyll and Hyde.

There is, however, a kind of duality in the book itself. It’s a fascinating read based on a couple of suspect propositions. The love Stevenson and Katharine may or may not have had for each other is, of course, unquantifiable. Hopkins also struggles to make the case for “Red-Litten Windows” being the inspiration for Jekyll and Hyde. He discovers no new evidence as to what order they were written in and concludes that it is “impossible to say” whether one story was inspired by the other.

Nevertheless, Hopkins reproduces “Red-Litten” in its entirety as well as another of Katharine’s stories entitled “The Old River House”. Both were published under the pseudonym Theodor Hertz-Garten He gamely attempts to find some redeeming features in the stories but contemporary reviews were damming and the best anyone said of them was that they were “well written”. It’s not clear why Hopkins reproduces Katherine’s entire oeuvre here – unless to prevent an already slender book from becoming too thin – but they at least explain Stevenson’s reluctance to promote her as a writer.

Katharine said little about Stevenson until the end of her life and was certainly closer to a Mrs Jekyll than he was to a Cousin Hyde. Her steadiness is a stark contrast to Fanny Stevenson’s volatility. But had Katharine written “The Nixie” instead of Fanny, she would have drained the life from it and that might be the saddest thing of all.