Shirley Jackson was One of Us

So, a little more poking about in the Shirley Jackson biography (A RATHER HAUNTED LIFE, by Ruth Franklin) shows that though she does not seem to have written fantasy herself deplored the trend towards realistic children's fiction, having herself grown up on the Oz books. When she discovered that her daughter "had a series of dreams about an imaginary country, Shirley encouraged her to draw maps of it and (perhaps recalling the language she once invented) make up languages spoken there." (Franklin p.166).

The reference to Jackson's invented language harkens back to her college days at the University of Rochester:

Rather than following her syllabi, Jackson pursued her own intellectual interests: at one point she spent hours devising an invented language called Lildsune, complete with grammatical rules, and even wrote poetry in it. (Franklin p. 58)*
No wonder she liked Tolkien!

But the story about Jackson I liked best was The Dime of Wind:

When eight-year-old Laurence asked his mother how he ought to spend a dime, she suggested that he give itto the birch tree in front of their house. He promptly went outside and asked the tree for a dime's worth of wind. To Shirley's amusement, a massive hurricane struck that night. "All we could figure was that wind must be very cheap indeed for him to get that much for a dime" she wrote.(p. 166)


--JDR
--current reading: the Franklin.

*apparently Jackson's Lildsune material is now in the Library of Congress