SOURCE: "The Strange Case of Mary Reilly," in Extrapolation, Vol. 34, No. 1, Spring, 1993, pp. 39-47.

In the following essay. Roberts examines Mary Reilly as a psychological novel relating the process of individuation as well as the effects of child abuse on individual development.

While works based on literary classics receive some scholarly attention and interest, they tend not to achieve lasting fame unless they present independent vision and worlds of their own. Fielding's Shamela comes right to mind, with his hilarious satire of Richardson's moral view, epistolary style, and psychological focus in Pamela, as does Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, where he replaces Shakespeare's Elizabethan order and individualism in Hamlet with the modern, existential attitude toward the human condition. Valerie Martin's Mary Reilly (1990) tells the story of Jekyll and Hyde (1886) from the experience of the maid who, in Stevenson's novella, stands "huddled together like a flock of sheep...