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Summary
Summary
Instantly heralded for its "masterful" and "thrilling" portrayal ( Boston Globe ), Shirley Jackson reveals the tumultuous life and inner darkness of the literary genius behind such classics as "The Lottery" and The Haunting of Hill House . In this "remarkable act of reclamation" (Neil Gaiman), Ruth Franklin envisions Jackson as "belonging to the great tradition of Hawthorne, Poe and James" ( New York Times Book Review ) and demonstrates how her unique contribution to the canon "so uncannily channeled women's nightmares and contradictions that it is "nothing less than the secret history of American women of her era'" ( Washington Post ). Franklin investigates the "interplay between the life, the work, and the times with real skill and insight, making this fine book a real contribution not only to biography, but to mid-20th-century women's history" ( Chicago Tribune ). "Wisely rescu[ing] Shirley Jackson from any semblance of obscurity" (Lena Dunham), Franklin's invigorating portrait stands as the definitive biography of a generational avatar and an American literary genius.
60 illustrations
Author Notes
Ruth Franklin is a book critic and frequent contributor to The New Yorker, Harper's, and many other publications. A recipient of a New York Public Library Cullman Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship, she lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Literary critic Franklin (A Thousand Darknesses) renders a gripping and graceful portrait of the mind, life, and work of groundbreaking American author Shirley Jackson (1916-1965). Though Jackson is today largely known for the chilling novel The Haunting of Hill House and the supremely upsetting short parable "The Lottery," Franklin brings forth her full oeuvre for careful study, including a prodigious number of short stories, books for young adults and children, and-perhaps improbably for a horror writer-two bestselling memoirs about life with her four children, Life Among the Savages and Raising Demons. Franklin's adept readings of Jackson's influences, formative relationships, and major works interweave the obsessions, fears, and life experiences that charge her writing with such wicked intensity. Treating her subject with a generous eye and gorgeous prose, Franklin describes one of Jackson's chief themes, a "preoccupation with the roles that women play at home and the forces that conspire to keep them there," as a product of her cultural moment, identifying Jackson's "insistence on telling unpleasant truths" about women's experience and her ability "to draw back the curtain on the darkness within the human psyche" as the elements that make Jackson a writer of lasting relevance who can still give today's readers an impressive shiver. 60 illus. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* When Shirley Jackson's The Lottery was published in the New Yorker in 1948, the response was a pen-paper-postage equivalent of going viral. Although Jackson wrote many more works of arresting literary suspense concerned with cruelty and alienation, as well as, improbably enough, best-selling true-life domestic comedy (the forerunner, as critic Franklin notes, of today's mommy blogs), she is generally remembered only for that singular tale. In her engrossing and enlightening foundational biography, Franklin redresses this unjust diminishing of Jackson's extraordinary accomplishments, the final insult in a too-brief life poisoned by the selfishness of those closest to her her harshly critical mother and her philandering husband, the literary critic Stanley Hyman. Franklin seamlessly combines the bitterly ironic story of Jackson's demanding, self-destructive life in which she strived for literary breakthroughs while supporting herself, Hyman, and their four children and running their hectic households, primarily in Vermont with astute analysis of Jackson's disquieting, darkly funny, profoundly subversive writings. With unprecedented access to private papers, Franklin traces the evolution of Jackson's sensibility as a writer, building toward an ever-more nuanced understanding of the covert ways she deftly paired the horrific with the mundane to both express her own anger and pain while also illuminating the fears, anxiety, anti-Semitism, racism, and sexism of the conformity-obsessed Cold War era. A precise, revelatory, and moving reclamation of an American literary master.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2016 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
SHIRLEY JACKSON ONCE WROTE that when she went to the hospital to deliver the third of her four children, the admitting clerk asked for her occupation. "Writer," Jackson replied. The clerk said, "I'll just put down housewife." All her life, Jackson struggled to be taken seriously as a writer. To her chagrin, she was far better known (and better compensated) for the women's-magazine essays she wrote about housekeeping and child-rearing - today they seem like high-end Erma Bombeck - than for her quirky, hard-to-categorize novels like "The Haunting of Hill House" and "We Have Always Lived in the Castle." Even in her marriage, it was her husband, Stanley Edgar Hyman, a literary critic and popular teacher at Bennington College, who hogged all the attention, though it was mostly her earnings that paid for their lifestyle of nonstop boozing and extravagant book-buying and gift-giving. A few of the Bennington students knew who she was, but to most she was just another faculty wife, and a fat and creepy one at that, someone who drank too much and whose house stank of cat pee. Jackson's posthumous reputation is hardly much better: She is mostly known these days for a single, over anthologized short story, "The Lottery." A few years ago, when the Library of America brought out a collection of her stories and novels, the Newsweek critic Malcolm Jones accused the Library of stooping so low it was about to "jump the shark." But Jackson has always had a coterie of admirers, including Stephen King, Jonathan Lethem, Joyce Carol Oates, the critics Laura Miller and Ruth Franklin, and with this welcome new biography Franklin makes a thoughtful and persuasive case for Jackson as a serious and accomplished literary artist - not a major one, perhaps, but one worthy of renewed attention. "Her body of work constitutes nothing less than the secret history of American women of her era," Franklin writes, placing at the center of Jackson's life the ever-pressing conflict between being an artist and being a wife and mother. That Jackson struggled with this dilemma is certainly true, and the chaotic life that resulted is the subject of much of her nonfiction. But as Franklin's subtitle, "A Rather Haunted Life," suggests, Jackson also had a tragic private life: She was a fragile, damaged and often desolate person, subject not just to the trials that beset ambitious women of her generation but to torments all her own. Chief among the tormentors was her mother, a vain, thoughtlessly cruel social climber who didn't think much of her daughter and never bothered to disguise it. She wanted a beautiful, dutiful child she could groom to be a debutante, and instead she got one who was dreamy, willful and overweight, more interested in making up stories than in clothes or hairstyles. As an adolescent, Jackson was such a mess that her mother informed her she was the product of a failed abortion. Jackson rebelled by going off to Syracuse University (her parents wanted her to stay in Rochester, N.Y., where they had moved from California and were serial country-club joiners) and marrying Hyman: not just a Jew but (for a while, anyway) a Communist. But to the end of her life Jackson also remained in thrall to her impossible-to-please mother, writing her elaborate letters trying to justify herself and explaining what a successful wife and parent she was. In truth, she was always an outsider, someone who never quite fit in. The scapegoat theme of "The Lottery" doubtless derives from the way she and her family were shunned by their provincial neighbors, who had no use for Jews or writers or for Negroes like Ralph Ellison, who was a frequent houseguest. Jackson's husband was both an ally and an antagonist. They began as soul mates: Hyman had never even met her when, after reading a story of Jackson's in an undergraduate magazine, he declared he was going to marry her, and he remained an ardent champion. At times, he was a little like Colette's Willy, nagging her to get back to the typewriter. But they also drove each other crazy. He was fastidious; she was sloppy. In theory he was devoted to the children, but left all the work to her. And Hyman, who objected to monogamy on philosophical grounds, was chronically unfaithful. Franklin says he mostly adhered to a "hundred-mile rule," scheduling his trysts far from home, and unlike many Bennington profs, he at least waited until his students had graduated before pursuing them. But these affairs caused Jackson great pain nonetheless, especially toward the end of her life, when he actually fell in love with one of his conquests. Neglecting the shift key, as she almost always did, she told him in a letter: "you once wrote me a letter (i know you hate my remembering these things) telling me that i would never be lonely again, i think that was the first, the most dreadful, lie you ever told me." Jackson, for her part, once enjoyed a drunken grope, and possibly more, with Dylan Thomas on a winter night in Connecticut, but in general seems less sexually driven than Hyman. There is some evidence, though Franklin dismisses it, that as a child she may have been molested by her Uncle Clifford. In college some people thought she might be a lesbian, though there is even less evidence for that. She had, in fact, an exaggerated fear of lesbianism, and in the late '50s was sent into a tailspin of depression when she discovered herself mentioned in a scholarly book about lesbian-themed writing. In Jackson's own work, as several critics have pointed out, sex is mostly noticeable for being so absent. Her characters long for emotional connections but seldom make them. The story of Jackson's sad and difficult career is told with more vividness and in some ways with more intimacy in an earlier biography, Judy Oppenheimer's "Private Demons," which came out in 1988, and which Franklin, though a careful researcher and fastidious about sources, never mentions in the text. But Oppenheimer is a journalist, not a critic, and her book, based largely on interviews with Jackson's family and friends, is interested more in the life than the work. The value of Franklin's book, which benefited from access to archives unavailable to Oppenheimer, is its thoroughness and the way she traces Jackson's evolution as an artist, sensibly pointing out what's autobiographical and what isn't. She sees Jackson not as an oddball, one-off writer of horror tales and ghost stories but as someone belonging to the great tradition of Hawthorne, Poe and James, writers preoccupied, as she was, with inner evil in the human soul. But her prose, it should be added, was a lot less upholstered than theirs. What makes her masterpiece, "The Haunting of Hill House," so scarily effective is its matter-of-factness, the cleanness of its narrative line. That book, a ghost story, is often compared to James's "Turn of the Screw," but as in a lot of Jackson's work, its darkness is partly lifted by a slyly humorous streak reminiscent of Muriel Spark or even the Hilary Mantel of novels like "Vacant Possession," "Fludd" and "Beyond Black." Franklin, more than Oppenheimer, wants to play down the chaos of Jackson's life, and even suggests that the hurtling back and forth between cooking and cleaning and stolen sessions at her desk may have been as enabling as it was burdensome. Until it wasn't. Always a heavy drinker and smoker, Jackson, while trying to lose weight, became dependent on pills of every sort, uppers and downers. Her mood swings became more extreme, and in 1963 she suffered a full-fledged breakdown, during which she was not only unable to write, she could barely leave her room. After seeking psychiatric help, she seemed to be recovering, and was happily working again, though also preoccupied with the idea of leaving Hyman and creating a new home somewhere. Then, on the sultry afternoon of Aug. 8, 1965, she had a heart attack and died in her sleep. She was only 48. At the time she was working in what she called "a new style," on a novel that she hoped would be "a funny book, a happy book." But her last published story, which came out four months later, was about a solitary New England woman who sent off nightly letters describing the terrible secrets of her neighbors. CHARLES McGRATH is a contributing writer for The Times and a former editor of the Book Review. He is the editor of a Library of America collection of John O'Hara's stories, which has just been published.
Guardian Review
A sympathetic biography argues for a feminist reappraisal of a tortured genius of American gothic "One who raises demons," the writer Shirley Jackson once observed, "must deal with them." Whether fiction could raise demons and deal with them remained for her an open question, one that drives Ruth Franklin's comprehensive new biography. In 1948 the 31-year-old Jackson, who had been publishing magazine fiction for a decade without attracting much notice, produced a very brief story for the New Yorker that would change everything. "The Lottery", a simple tale of villagers fulfilling a summer ritual that ends with one of the most shocking twists in modern fiction, became an instant sensation, catapulting its author into literary celebrity. Jackson's lifelong interest in rituals, witchcraft, charms and hexes were, Franklin convincingly maintains, metaphors for exploring power and disempowerment. (She pretended to be a witch, and was once labelled "Virginia Werewoolf".) The demons in Jackson's fiction might be social, as in "The Lottery"; or they might be personal and psychological, as in The Haunting of Hill House, which writers including Stephen King and Joyce Carol Oates have hailed as one of the greatest ghost stories of the 20th century. We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Jackson's final novel, brings social and psychological demons together in an unforgettable gothic space. "The relationship between a person's surroundings and his or her mental state was one she understood well," Franklin somewhat understatedly observes. In Jackson's work the house of fiction is always a haunted one, and usually it is women who are being disturbed, in both senses of the phrase. Franklin situates Jackson's conflicted relationship with coercive postwar US domesticity within the context that would give rise in 1963 to Betty Friedan's attack on "the feminine mystique". It was a time of rigid and rigidly enforced gender roles, as many women struggled to reconcile their own ambitions with society's expectations. A 1950s woman was, Franklin writes, "pressured by the media and the commercial culture to deny her personal and intellectual interests and subsume her identity into her husband's", and Jackson's fictional exploration of this conflict, she argues, "constitutes nothing less than the secret history of American women of her era". Without wanting to dispute the essential point, this seems a little overstated: as secrets go, the idea of the 1950s as a restrictive era for women is rather an open one. This was the argument not only of The Feminine Mystique, but of classic contemporary novels such as Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, which also pointed out that the impossibility of living up to the contradictory ideals of womanhood in the repressive 1950s was driving women mad. In Jackson's work the house of fiction is always a haunted one, and usually it is women who are being disturbed In The Bell Jar, Plath's heroine observes that if it is neurotic to want two mutually exclusive things, then she will be neurotic for the rest of her life. Jackson similarly commented: "I wrote of neuroses and fear and I think all my books laid end to end would be one long documentation of anxiety." It was an anxious age, as Franklin notes: the cold war meant that fears of apocalypse were ambient, making it an easily available metaphor in novels such as Jackson's The Sundial ; with typical humour, she set the apocalypse on 30 August because that was her deadline. "The Lottery" would go on to inspire such dark classics of social satire as The Wicker Man and The Hunger Games, but most of Jackson's fiction belongs in the tradition of the female gothic, in which madness, repressed rage, doubles and other images of psychic conflict haunt domestic spaces. A line can be drawn from Jane Eyre 's madwoman imprisoned in her husband's house, through Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" -- in which being similarly imprisoned drives a woman mad -- to bestselling 1950s books such as The Three Faces of Eve, in which a woman with multiple personalities is "cured" by two male psychiatrists with the authority to determine which facets of her identity are "normal". In Life Among the Savages, her comical account of domestic travails, Jackson describes going to the hospital to give birth to her third of four children. Asked by a clerk to state her occupation, she says that she is a writer. "I'll just put down housewife," the clerk replies. Humour can be another way of coping with disempowerment, of course, and by the end of her career Jackson was a master of black comedy. The deadpan opening of We Have Always Lived in the Castle is deservedly famous: "I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise," a young woman says, introducing herself to the reader. "I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cap mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead." Many consider it Jackson's masterpiece. Reviewing it in Esquire, Dorothy Parker wrote: "There is still sunshine for us. The miracle is wrought by Shirley Jackson, God bless her, as ever unparalleled ... [a] leader in the field of beautifully written, quiet, cumulative shudders. This novel brings back all my faith in terror and death. I can say no higher of it and her." After it was finished, Jackson had a breakdown and suffered for months from severe agoraphobia and panic attacks. Franklin's ambition in this sympathetic and fair-minded biography is to elevate Jackson to the status of a major 20th-century writer, rather than the minor author of "The Lottery" and a handful of enjoyably eerie novels. Jackson was raised in an affluent middle-class household, first in San Francisco and then in upstate New York; her parents were conformist and conservative, with a tendency towards social climbing. Jackson did not share their values and would not adhere to their expectations. Geraldine Jackson, who was herself frustrated by becoming pregnant too soon with Shirley, constantly criticised her daughter's appearance, especially her weight; Franklin does some fault-finding of her own, dismissing Geraldine's judgments as superficial and calling her "clueless". In adolescence Jackson was socially awkward, as so many exceptionally bright young women can be until they settle more comfortably into their identities and find a milieu that accepts their talents. That moment seemed to come when as a student at Syracuse University she met the brilliant Stanley Edgar Hyman, two years her junior, an aspiring critic of spectacular ambition, an IQ of 180 (which put him in the genius range), and a tendency to be arrogant and controlling. Even while they were dating, he informed Jackson that his philandering was a philosophical principle, and expected her to listen with docility to the details of his flings. Docility doesn't appear to have been in her repertoire, however: Jackson tried to suppress her rage, and nearly had a breakdown before they were married. The pattern, including Hyman's unapologetic and all-but-constant affairs, would fatally repeat itself. She began taking a frightening array of prescription medications, including Thorazine and Valium They married in 1940 (she was 23, he was 21), over the objections of both sets of parents: Hyman was Jewish, and mixed marriages remained uncommon. Jackson quickly became pregnant, and would have four children over the next 11 years. Money was a serious problem for that first decade, as the couple struggled to establish literary careers, and Jackson tried to submit to her competitive, complicated relationship with a husband who emerges from Franklin's portrait as emotionally abusive. At first things seemed promising: Hyman was hired as a staff writer at the New Yorker and began teaching at Bennington College, but he never published as much in the magazine as he hoped, and his first foray into teaching ended abruptly after he offended his colleagues. His ambitions were focused primarily on the major works of literary criticism he planned to produce, projects of such scope as to make Middlemarch 's Casaubon quail. His tomes took decades to complete, while Jackson's magazine fiction sold quickly, if erratically. They kept afloat by borrowing from her parents and against his salary at the New Yorker, while running a chaotic household, which exasperated Hyman. (As Franklin pointedly observes, his mania for order did not contribute to his ability to publish, but it did give him reasons to criticise Jackson for her failures of housekeeping.) Once "The Lottery" became a hit, however, Jackson began to command much higher prices, and before long was the family's primary breadwinner. Hyman still arrogated to himself all the male prerogatives of the era, expecting her to care for the children and keep the house to his meticulous, not to say cranky, standards: he refused to enter her study because her books were not alphabetised. After a few brief stints in Manhattan and Westport, Connecticut, the family settled in Vermont, where Hyman eventually was rehired at Bennington, becoming in the end a popular and successful teacher. Their friends included JD Salinger, who played catch with their son on the front lawn in Westport; Bernard Malamud ; and Ralph Ellison, who credited Hyman with making Invisible Man possible. The liberal Hymans did not feel at home in Westport or North Bennington, and unkind villagers who ostracise the inhabitants of chaotic homes became something of a feature in Jackson's fiction. At the same time, she was contributing comic pieces about the travails of domestic life to Good Housekeeping and Woman's Home Companion. Hyman insistently pressured her to write more, complaining whenever she wasn't working and attaching a price-tag to every letter she wrote to friends or family. Once "in a fury" he "figured out that considered in terms of pure writing time my letters are worth $40 a page". In truth, the fury was mutual, but only expressed in one direction: Jackson mostly channelled hers into her fiction. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, Jackson was plagued by anxiety throughout her life, and during a particularly bad episode in the early 50s was prescribed Dexamyl, a mixture of amphetamine and barbiturate that was used as a combination diet-pill and antidepressant miracle cure; she was a heavy drinker as well. She began taking a frightening array of prescription medications, including Thorazine and Valium, while her weight soared to dangerous levels. Hyman's efforts at control may also have taken the form of making him what we would now call a "feeder", encouraging Jackson to overeat as a means of keeping her dependent on him: "he would ... urge food on her. Thick cream pies ... I had to watch him stuffing her like a goose," said her agent later. Jackson's mother, across the country in California, was concerned at her daughter's appearance in publicity photos, and wrote in censorious terms. Certainly she can be faulted for being critical, and comes across as an awkward fit for her talented daughter. But Franklin tends to flatly blame Geraldine for her daughter's anxieties in ways that can be too simplistic; the book's clear feminist sympathies do not seem to expand beyond Jackson to her mother, who was presumably a product of her own upbringing. Similarly, when Geraldine objected to the photos of her now obese daughter, Franklin doesn't give her the benefit of the doubt, although she was expressing concern: "I know excess weight is hard on your heart and your blood pressure and I hated to see you using yourself so badly." It's rather unfair to suggest, as Franklin does, that an unkind letter about her daughter's appearance was more to blame for Jackson's breakdown and acute agoraphobia than the assortment of prescription medications she'd been taking for a decade, or the destructive jealousy corroding her marriage. In 1965, at the age of just 48, Jackson died in her sleep of heart failure. She had been writing stories and letters about escape; Franklin suggests she was ready to leave Hyman and make a bid for freedom. In the end that final conjuring trick was beyond her, but her fiction remains to haunt us with phantoms of female power, and female defeat. - Sarah Churchwell.
Library Journal Review
Despite battles with anxiety, oppressive societal expectations, and a fraught relationship with husband, literary critic Stanley Edgar Hyman, Shirley Jackson (1916-65) wrote six novels, a collection of short fiction, and a handful of nonfiction and children's books. Even though her promise as a writer of supernatural suspense reached fruition with The Haunting of Hill House, the author's most infamous work was the short story "The Lottery." The story-Jackson claimed to have written it in a single day-generated unprecedented buzz, confusion, antipathy, and even hate mail. Yet as Franklin (A Thousand Darknesses) points out in her engaging portrait, Jackson is far from a one-hit wonder. Franklin writes that "[her] brand of literary suspense is part of a vibrant and distinguished tradition that can be traced back to the American Gothic work of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, and Henry James." Drawing on a trove of research-including previously unpublished letters and interviews-and her own astute analysis of Jackson's fiction, Franklin gives her subject her much-deserved due and sets the standard for future literary biographers wrestling with the legacy and the unwarranted inattention of a major figure in 20th-century American literature. VERDICT Highly recommended for readers of Jackson's fiction as well as those interested in the connection between the inner lives of authors and their work. [See Prepub Alert, 3/28/16.]-Patrick A. Smith, -Bainbridge State Coll., GA © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
Note on Quotations | p. xiii |
Introduction: A Secret History | p. 1 |
1 Foundations: California, 1916-1933 | p. 11 |
2 The Demon in the Mind: Rochester, 1933-1937 | p. 43 |
3 Intentions Charged with Power: Brooklyn, 1919-1937 | p. 70 |
4 S & S: Syracuse, 1937-1940 | p. 90 |
5 The Mad Bohemians: New York, New Hampshire, Syracuse, 1940-1942 | p. 128 |
6 Garlic in Fiction: New York, 1942-1945 | p. 158 |
7 Sidestreet, U.S.A.: Bennington, The Road Through the Wall, 1945-1948 | p. 190 |
8 A Classic in Some Category: "The Lottery," 1948 | p. 221 |
9 Notes on a Modern Book of Witchcraft: The Lottery: or, The Adventures of James Harris, 1948-1949 | p. 248 |
10 The Lovely House: Westport, Hangsaman, 1950-1951 | p. 271 |
11 Cabbages and Savages: Bennington, Life Among the Savages, 1951-1953 | p. 304 |
12 Dr. Write: The Bird's Nest, 1953-1954 | p. 331 |
13 Domestic Disturbances: Raising Demons, 1954-1957 | p. 355 |
14 What is This World?: The Sundial, 1957-1958 | p. 382 |
15 The Heart of the House: The Haunting of Hill House, 1958-1959 | p. 407 |
16 Steady Against the World: We Have Always Lived in the Castle, 1960-1962 | p. 428 |
17 Writing is the Way Out: 1962-1964 | p. 457 |
18 Last Words: Come Along with Me, 1964-1965 | p. 485 |
Select Bibliography: Shirley Jackson's Published Works | p. 501 |
Notes | p. 503 |
Acknowledgments | p. 581 |
Permissions | p. 585 |
Index | p. 589 |