SOURCE: "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, as Observed by the Maid," in The New York Times, January 26, 1990, p. C28.

In the following unfavorable review, Kakutani faults Mary Reilly as merely a rewrite of Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886).

Written in 1886, Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde remains both a classic in the literature of the double or doppelganger and a period piece of Victoriana, reflecting the social hypocrisies of that era. As readers will readily recall, the Stevenson book recounts the story of one Dr. Henry Jekyll, a socially prominent physician, who develops a drug that transforms him into his evil alter ego, an apelike creature named Edward Hyde. Although he also creates an antidote that will restore him to his respectable daylight existence as Dr. Jekyll, the demonic self grows stronger and stronger, eventually taking over possession of his body. Not...