Lightning Review

Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life by Ruth Franklin

A

Shirley Jackson

by Ruth Franklin

Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life is depressing, but also fascinating. This biography follows the life of the author of The Lottery, The Haunting of Hill House, and We Have Always Lived in The Castle from her birth to her premature death at the age of 48. The biography presents Jackson as complicated, neurotic, brilliant, often very happy, but often terribly frustrated.

The biographer, Ruth Franklin, presents Shirley as a person who was torn between her domestic and creative life. As a woman who was married from 1940 until her death in 1965, she was responsible for the management of the house and raising the four children that she had with her husband, Stanley Edgar Hyman. Hyman, a book critic, was so dependent on her for household issues that when Shirley died, Stanley was unable to make a cup of coffee without assistance from his daughters.

At the same time, Shirley was the primary breadwinner in the house, and Stanley resented any time that Shirley spent writing letters or writing in her diary because he felt it took away from her earning potential as a writer. Shirley felt resentful of Stanley’s many affairs and his refusal to engage emotionally with the family – he preferred to work in his neat study and spend time with university students than engage with his wife, four children, and many, many pets. Shirley considered divorce many times and themes of family, home, and escape are featured repeatedly in her work.

As depressing as this material is, it’s also excellent reading for writers and for readers who are interested in the history of women artists and the role of women in society. The book details how Shirley went through boom and bust times when trying to get her work published, how she was sometimes creatively blocked and at other times overflowed with ideas, and how her ideas evolved from draft to draft. It also explores social issues including anti-Semitism (Hyman was Jewish), racism, and feminism, as well as Jackson’s struggles with her weight and her self-esteem. By putting all these issues in both a personal and historical context, the biography gives the reader great insight into Jackson’s life as well as the lives of other women of the time period. It’s a great resource and a compelling read – just don’t expect anything cheery.

Carrie S

Still known to millions primarily as the author of the The Lottery, Shirley Jackson (1916–1965) has been curiously absent from the mainstream American literary canon. A genius of literary suspense and psychological horror, Jackson plumbed the cultural anxiety of postwar America more deeply than anyone. Now, biographer Ruth Franklin reveals the tumultuous life and inner darkness of the author of such classics as The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle.

Placing Jackson within an American Gothic tradition that stretches back to Hawthorne and Poe, Franklin demonstrates how her unique contribution to this genre came from her focus on “domestic horror.” Almost two decades before The Feminine Mystique ignited the women’s movement, Jackson’ stories and nonfiction chronicles were already exploring the exploitation and the desperate isolation of women, particularly married women, in American society. Franklin’s portrait of Jackson gives us “a way of reading Jackson and her work that threads her into the weave of the world of words, as a writer and as a woman, rather than excludes her as an anomaly” (Neil Gaiman).

The increasingly prescient Jackson emerges as a ferociously talented, determined, and prodigiously creative writer in a time when it was unusual for a woman to have both a family and a profession. A mother of four and the wife of the prominent New Yorker critic and academic Stanley Edgar Hyman, Jackson lived a seemingly bucolic life in the New England town of North Bennington, Vermont. Yet, much like her stories, which channeled the occult while exploring the claustrophobia of marriage and motherhood, Jackson’s creative ascent was haunted by a darker side. As her career progressed, her marriage became more tenuous, her anxiety mounted, and she became addicted to amphetamines and tranquilizers. In sobering detail, Franklin insightfully examines the effects of Jackson’s California upbringing, in the shadow of a hypercritical mother, on her relationship with her husband, juxtaposing Hyman’s infidelities, domineering behavior, and professional jealousy with his unerring admiration for Jackson’s fiction, which he was convinced was among the most brilliant he had ever encountered.

Based on a wealth of previously undiscovered correspondence and dozens of new interviews, Shirley Jackson—an exploration of astonishing talent shaped by a damaging childhood and turbulent marriage—becomes the definitive biography of a generational avatar and an American literary giant.

Nonfiction
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