And even though it can be enjoyed as a terrifying thriller, it is also an indictment of the treatment of women’s mental health in the 1900s. There are allegorical implications in this story as well, but ultimately it is about a woman succumbing to a nervous breakdown. In this chilling story, a “hysterical” wife is brought to a country house for a rest, but is slowly driven mad by, among other things, the crushing oppression of the wallpaper in her room. The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilmore (1899) But even more than that, it’s an allegory of human experience, of the good and evil in everyone, of conflicting desires and violent impulses. Yes, there is a serum that Jekyll drinks to transform himself into his evil alter ego, Hyde, but this book is ultimately an allegory of a man with dissociative personality disorder. Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson (1886) In some, the villains are unstable, and in others, the heroes are. That doesn’t mean that I haven’t enjoyed thrillers that have used the ravages of mental illness in a variety of ways. I also thought it was important that she be presented as someone who is currently in remission taking her meds, doing fine. I didn’t want her to be defined by mental instability, nor did I want it to be an advantage to her. It was important for me to present her diagnosis as just one facet of her personality. In my latest book, Before She Knew Him, my protagonist, Henrietta Mazur, suffers from Bipolar Disorder.

Peter swanson before she knew him