Shirley Jackson

And why her writing resonates today.

On this day 107 years ago, Shirley Jackson was born. She was raised in an affluent San Francisco neighbourhood by conservative parents, one being a mother so critical, Jackson spent much of her life rallying against her.

It was an upbringing that defined her writing, inspiring stories about alienation in suburbia, tradition, and being misunderstood, compounded by prejudices of the time and a marriage with literary critic, Stanley Edgar Hyman.

One regularly referenced anecdote is when Jackson arrived at hospital to deliver her third child and was asked her occupation. After saying she was a writer, the clerk replied with, “I’ll just put down housewife.”

But Jackson was bold. Despite the pressure, she persisted, finishing six novels and over 200 short stories before her death at just 48. She was someone who studied witchcraft, wrote with such sharp humour she became the family’s unconventional breadwinner, and, according to The New Yorker, dyed her mashed potatoes green.

Her stories, like most, split opinion. While Stephen King said in Danse Macabre that her novel, The Haunting of Hill House, was one of “the only two great novels of the supernatural in the last hundred years,” (alongside Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw) others believed someone “mostly famous for one short story” didn't deserve their own volume.

In this case, I’m with King.

So, on her birthday, I wanted to bring together a reading list for those unfamiliar with Jackson. If you’re interested in reading the work of someone who helped define the horror landscape, start here.

The Lottery

“…and then they were upon her.”

Perhaps the most famous Shirley Jackson work, The Lottery is a short story published in The New Yorker in 1948.

Telling the tale of a small New England village that keeps to an annual and barbaric tradition called “the lottery”, it was considered so shocking that the publication received the most complaints it had ever received for a piece of fiction.

In an essay titled Biography of a Story years after, Jackson said this on its reception:

“Curiously, there are three main themes which dominate the letters of that first summer – three themes which might be identified as bewilderment, speculation, and plain old-fashioned abuse. […] The general tone of the early letters, however, was a kind of wide-eyed, shocked innocence. People at first were not so much concerned with what the story meant; what they wanted to know was where these lotteries were held, and whether they could go there and watch.”

Image credit.

We Have Always Lived in the Castle

“We eat the year away. We eat the spring and the summer and the fall. We wait for something to grow and then we eat it.”

If there’s ever a book that captures feelings of isolation and fear of the outside world, it’s this one. In her later life, Jackson struggled with agoraphobia, suffering from a nervous breakdown. You can sense that struggle here.

As her final published novel, it tells the story of the Blackwood family, who live in a house cut off from the surrounding villagers. Aside from a weekly trip to get groceries, the Blackwoods live alone, tormented and judged by outsiders that hate them after a fatal poisoning left other members of the family dead.

This is my personal favourite, exploring family and loneliness in a way that’s as creepy as it is captivating.

The Haunting of Hill House

“Promise me absolutely that you will leave, as fast as you can, if you begin to feel the house catching at you.”

After reading about a group of people who rent a house to study the paranormal, Jackson wrote The Haunting of Hill House, about a collection of characters that stay at Hill House to help Dr. Montague confirm whether or not the mansion is haunted.

The narrative follows Eleanor who, alongside the rest of the group, experiences a number of strange and unexplainable events.

While these events are unsettling, the true horror is experiencing Hill House through Eleanor’s view of the world, seeing how her and the house interact, and trying to figure out what’s real and what’s going on inside her head.

Just An Ordinary Day

“Dinner had been good; Margaret sat with her book on her lap and watched her husband digesting, an operation to which he always gave much time and thought.”

There are several collections of short stories that have been released since Jackson’s passing. As the one I read most recently, it feels like Just An Ordinary Day should be the one to recommend.

It contains “tales of torment, psychological aberration, and the macabre,” many of which were discovered unpublished and uncollected by her children after her death.

There’s a lot of stories here but if you like subtle horror, familial tension, and moments that prompt you to look at the mundane through a new lens, you’ll find something to like.

Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life

“No writer since Henry James has been so successful in exploring the psychological reach of terror, locating in what we fear the key to unlock the darkest corners of the psyche.”

This isn’t written by Jackson but, if you want to learn more about her work, her life, and what influenced her, Ruth Franklin’s Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life is the place to start.

It offers a thorough look at Jackson’s contribution to “domestic horror”, the American Gothic, and the reality of being a woman with both a family and profession at that time in America.

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From 2018’s The Haunting of Hill House TV series to 2020’s biographical movie Shirley, Jackson’s influence seems to be on the rise.

And I can understand why.

We live in anxious times. The line that separates community and mob mentality runs thin. We’re on the other side of a pandemic where, like Jackson, we were scared of leaving the house, afraid of the outside world. We know that there is bravery in challenging tradition and conservatism, but understand the risks that come with doing so.

While she was writing from her own experience, in a time with its own fears and challenges, they’re feelings that resonate now as they did then. That thought isn’t a comforting one, but it is what makes Shirley Jackson’s storytelling magic.

Before you go

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/ JJW