shirley jackson a rather haunted life by ruth franklin

“I’ll just put down housewife,” he replies. A clerk asks her to state her occupation when she arrives at a hospital to give birth to her third child she tells him to put writer. But often the more insidious poison is in the protagonist’s mind - a self-destructive, inescapable force.įranklin is keen to home in on the limitations imposed on Jackson as a pre- Feminine Mystique woman of the Fifties (she was born in 1916). And 'Flower Garden', a story of a woman being shunned in an initially friendly Vermont community where unspoken racism forms a poisonous backdrop, is a slowly unfolding marvel. In the story 'A Fine Old Firm', in the collection The Lottery and Other Stories, Mrs Friedman pays a visit to the WASP-y Mrs Concord – their sons are both in the army – and you have to read it twice to glean the anti-Semitism within.

She’s also very skilled in the subtle exposure of racism and prejudice.

'The Lottery', although she didn’t like being defined by it, echoes a theme that is present in much of Jackson’s fiction (to help pay the bills, she also wrote jolly pieces for magazines about domestic life with Hyman, their four children and many cats): that of scapegoating and of cruelty towards the outsider, often in apparently idyllic settings – 'Summer People', also in Dark Stories, is another wonderful example. It’s included in Dark Tales, a newly published collection). She gives vivid insights into the world of literary agents and editors in 1940s and '50s New York, as well as exploring Jackson’s hard-partying social circle – Hyman was a New Yorker writer as well as an academic and critic, and their friends included Ralph Ellison, Howard Nemerov and Dylan Thomas (she had a brief, drunken fling with him and dedicated one of her more mysterious short stories, 'A Visit', to him. In her biography, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life, Ruth Franklin plays down the broomstick tag and skilfully unpicks the threads of Jackson’s life and work. Rumours of black magic swirled, not surprisingly, as she called herself a “practicing amateur witch”. Its success put Jackson firmly in the public eye, which unnerved her – partly because now the neighbours in North Bennington, Vermont (her husband, Stanley Edgar Hyman, was a lecturer at Bennington College) knew who she was. Some of the letter-writers believed it to be true. It’s still chilling, this calmly told story of everyday villagers who have a yearly ritual: that of stoning one of the members of their close-knit community to death.

Shirley jackson a rather haunted life by ruth franklin