SOURCE: An interview in Contemporary Literature, Vol. 34, No. 1, Spring, 1993, pp. 1-17.

In the following interview, originally conducted in early 1992, Martin discusses her novels—particularly Mary Reilly—the major themes of her work, her reception among critics, and her aims as a writer.

Valerie Martin's disturbing personal vision has, over the past fifteen years, continually returned to the city of her youth, testing the limits of the gothic form within a New Orleans of the imagination. The locale of her earlier novels, Set in Motion (1978), Alexandra (1979), and A Recent Martyr (1987), and her collections of short stories, Love (1977) and The Consolation of Nature (1988), New Orleans is revisited once more in a work in progress tentatively titled "The Great Divorce." Martin's most recent novel, Mary Reilly (1989), a vivid retelling of Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde from the perspective of Jekyll's maid, therefore provides an...