Fanny Stevenson burned it after dismissing it to a friend as "a quire full of utter nonsense". She said - of what became the world's most admired and profound horror story - "He said it was his greatest work. I shall burn it after I show it to you".

Stevenson, an invalid almost deranged by tuberculosis and the effects of medicinal cocaine, had to spend the next three days feverishly rewriting and redrafting the 30,000-word story by hand.

Within weeks, the new version of his pioneering novel about split personality was in print. Despite Fanny's view, it was an instant bestseller. Sermons were preached on it in thousands of churches, including St Paul's cathedral, London. It was pirated in the US and in translation.

It rescued the Stevensons from acute debt. For the first time, the couple had enough money to live comfortably.

Some 115 years later, Fanny's deed has been disclosed in a two-page letter on pages torn from a notebook. It was written by her in 1885 to Stevenson's close friend and fellow poet WE Henley.

Henley, who was one-legged, was the model for Long John Silver in Treasure Island. He is still known for the lines: "I am the master of my fate,/I am the captain of my soul".

'Distasteful'



The letter is expected to fetch some £1,500 at auction at Phillips in London on November 17. Yesterday, Liz Merry head of Phillips's book department, said the writer's wife apparently threw the manuscript on the fire because "she considered Dr Jekyll and the duality of man rather distasteful.

"It's my belief that she thought Dr Jekyll, which was partly based on a dream, was not worthy of him. She was also uneasy because he was writing it for a "shilling shocker" series of novels. It is ironic that it turned out to be one of his most successful books."

But other sources believe Fanny acted in a spirit of literary criticism rather than artistic vandalism. One biographer says she felt the first draft did not sufficiently bring out the theme of allegory which was to make the story so compelling to psychologists like Sigmund Freud.

Despite the Hollywood films which have been based on it, Stevenson's atmospheric novel contains no sex and little violence, though these are strongly implied.

But what is clear is that Fanny, with creditors at their door, was in despair about her sick husband's ability to produce publishable work.

In an earlier letter, she wrote: "Louis is possessed of a story that he will try to work at. To stop him seems to annoy him to such a degree that I am letting him alone as the better alternative; but I fear it will only be energy wasted - as all his late work has been."

The Scots author was recovering at the time from a haemorrhage and from the death of a close friend. He said he he wrote out of hunger and the need to survive "a few years more" to support his family.

The germ of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde came to him in a cocaine-induced nightmare in their Bournemouth home. His screams aroused Fanny, who indignantly woke him. "Why did you wake me?" he said. "I was dreaming a fine bogey tale."

Dawn found him writing frantically to capture and elaborate the dream on paper. He wrote the first draft in three days at an extraordinary rate of 10,000 words a day. Stephen King, the most modern prolific horror author, is content if he can achieve 1,000 words a day.

But scholars knew before yesterday that Fanny disliked the first draft. Before her letter was discovered, the Stevenson scholar, Alanna Knight, wrote: "Angrily, Stevenson threw it on the fire. For the next three days the family walked on tiptoe glimpsing him sitting up in bed, surrounded by written and torn-up pages". Together, the first and final drafts took him a total of six days.

Fanny wrote afterwards: "That an invalid in my husband's condition performed the manual labour alone seems incredible. He was suffering from continual haemorrhages and hardly allowed to speak, his conversation carried on by means of a slate and pencil."

Stevenson himself told a critic dourly: "The wheels of Byles the Butcher [a joking reference to his creditors, taken from George Eliot's novel Middlemarch] drive exceedingly swiftly."

Of his story, with its haunted moral that "man is not truly one, but truly two", he wrote to a friend: "I send you herewith a Gothic gnome, interesting I think, and he came out of a deep mine, where he guards the fountain of tears."

Gone forever, lost treasures

Sir Richard Burton (1821-1890)

The Victorian explorer and Orientalist, was known as an expert on every scholarly subject "including pornography" - he translated the Kama Sutra and, from rare Arabic manuscripts, The Perfumed Garden.

His more explicit writings were burned by his widow, Isobel, after his death.

Philip Larkin (1922-1985)

The publicly reticent poet, in one of the greatest losses to 20th century biography, left a will asking his companion, Monica Jones, to burn all of his personal diaries after his death in 1985. However, his indiscreet letters have survived

Camille Claudel (1864-1943)

The admired sculptor was the mistress of Auguste Rodin for 15 years. Her feelings of injustice at his hands led her frequently to destroy all the work in her studio. Taken by force to an asylum in 1913, where she died

Nikolai Gogol (1809-1852)

The Russian dramatist and novelist fell victim to the "spiritual sadism" of an extreme Moscow priest, Father Matyev Konstantinovsky.

Ten days before Gogol's death in 1852, while mentally unbalanced, he burned the final volume of his masterpiece, Dead Souls, at the priest's order

Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882)

The poet and painter was so distressed by the suicide of his wife Elizabeth Siddal from an overdose of laudanum in 1862 that he buried all his manuscripts with her.

Later he changed his mind and had her body exhumed to recover them. He justified this volte face by telling a friend, "Art was the only thing for which she felt very seriously"