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Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life

Ruth Franklin (Goodreads Author)

3.86 · Rating details · 4,601 ratings · 500 reviews

This historically engaging and relevant biography establishes Shirley Jackson as a towering figure in American literature and revives the life and work of a neglected master.

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 This historically engaging and relevant biography establishes Shirley Jackson as a towering figure in American literature and revives the life and work of a neglected master.

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's 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. ...more

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Hardcover, 608 pages

Published September 27th 2016 by Liveright

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Jan 03, 2017 Julie rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: non-fiction, biography, memoir, 2017, history, e-book

Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life by Ruth Franklin is a 2016 Liveright publication.

I wonder, when hearing the name Shirley Jackson, which book pops into your mind? ‘The Lottery’ or ‘We Have Always Lived in a Castle’ or ‘The Haunting of Hill House’?

I’d bet most people associate Jackson with Hill House, which is understandable. But, for me, ‘The Lottery’ is the first thing that pops into my mind. Mainly, this is because of a personal experience, that even after all these years, still sticks ...more

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Feb 10, 2020 Terri rated it it was amazing

Shelves: awards-nom-edgar, awards-nom-pen, awards-nom-national-critics, women-writers-biography, writer-shirley-jackson

“My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all, I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in our family is dead.”
― Shirley Jackson ...more

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Aug 09, 2016 Ellie rated it really liked it

Shelves: non-fiction, 2016indchallenge, bio-memoir, writers

This biography of Shirley Jackson is a comprehensive exploration of a fascinating woman, who was full of contradictions. Her children's perception of her as a happy mother is challenged by her use of drugs. She appears to have suffered from her husband's infidelities while at the same time maintaining a seemingly "happy" marriage. All this while writing some of the best books of her time. Her story "The Lottery" is a sharp look at small town life (in this case, a village) that is still taught in ...more

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Oct 01, 2016 Frank Errington rated it it was amazing

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Admittedly, I don't read a lot of biographies. Not my thing. Nothing against them, I just prefer to spend my time reading fiction. That being said, when I saw there was going to be a Shirley Jackson bio, I decided to get out of my comfort zone just a bit.

Shirley Jackson is perhaps most remembered for her short story, THE LOTTERY, and her novel, THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE, but there is so much more to her short life.

The bio covers her childhood, college years (she wasn't a very good st Review copy

Admittedly, I don't read a lot of biographies. Not my thing. Nothing against them, I just prefer to spend my time reading fiction. That being said, when I saw there was going to be a Shirley Jackson bio, I decided to get out of my comfort zone just a bit.

Shirley Jackson is perhaps most remembered for her short story, THE LOTTERY, and her novel, THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE, but there is so much more to her short life.

The bio covers her childhood, college years (she wasn't a very good student), early published works, novels, family life, her troubles with anxiety and a period of agoraphobia, and ends with her untimely death.

Shirley Jackson was the mother of four. Two boys and two girls. Laurence (Laurie), Joanne (Jannie), Sarah (Sally), & Barry. Each unique in their own way and often fodder for lighter, more humorous stories she wrote, in sharp contrast to her more serious pieces. She also had a sense of humor about the children's misdeeds. One day Laurence, twelve or thirteen years old, balked when she told him to take a bath. Shirley went into the kitchen, came back with an egg, and smashed it on his head. "Now you need a bath," she told him.

Her husband, Stanley Hyman, was a firm believer in polyamorous relationships, much to Jackson's dismay, but despite numerous thoughts of divorce throughout the years, the couple remained married until her death in 1965.

Of the many quotes from Jackson's work included in her biography, there was one which seemed just as relevant today, as it was when written 60+ years ago. From THE WITCHCRAFT OF SALEM VILLAGE.

"We are not more tolerant or more valiant than the people of Salem, and we are just as willing to do battle with an imaginary enemy...The people of Salem hanged and tortured their neighbors from a deep conviction that they were right to do so. Some of our own deepest convictions may be false. We might say that we have far more to be afraid of today than the people of Salem ever dreamed of, but that would not really be true. We have exactly the same thing to be afraid of--the demon in men's minds which prompts hatred and anger and fear, an irrational demon which shows a different face to every generation, but never gives up its fight to win over the world."

The biography is certainly complete, right own to the seemingly most minor of details. As much a treatise on the times and the publishing industry in general as it was on the life of Jackson. Plus, there are a number of wonderful pictures interspersed throughout the book.

Recommended for all readers who are the least bit curious about Shirley Jackson.

Published by Liveright, a division of W.W. Norton & Company, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life is available in hardcover, e-book, and audio formats.

From the author's bio. Ruth Franklin is a book critic and former editor at The New Republic. She has written for many publications, including The New Yorker, Harper’s, The New York Times Book Review, The New York Review of Books, and Salmagundi. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in biography, a Cullman Fellowship at the New York Public Library, a Leon Levy Fellowship in biography, and the Roger Shattuck Prize for Criticism. Her first book, A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction (Oxford University Press, 2011), was a finalist for the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

...more

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Jan 04, 2017 Book Riot Community added it

I technically have not finished reading this one, despite starting in August, but that’s because it is so so so so good that I am savoring every word. A loving tribute to my favorite author. One million thumbs up; all the stars.

–Annika Barranti Klein

from The Best Books We Read In November 2016: http://bookriot.com/2016/12/01/the-be... ...more

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Oct 04, 2016 Robert rated it it was amazing

Shelves: biography, shirley-jackson

7/6/18: reread it this week and it’s even better than I’d remembered. Hats off to Ruth Franklin for a marvelous job of synthesizing all the facts of Jackson’s life into such a rich narrative.

A Rather Haunted Life is an excellent, highly readable biography of my favorite author, Shirley Jackson. It seems to have some real buzz, which is fabulous, as all modern day buzz for Jackson related books = long overdue. While I loved the 1988 biography Private Demons by Judy Oppenheimer, here Ruth Franklin 7/6/18: reread it this week and it’s even better than I’d remembered. Hats off to Ruth Franklin for a marvelous job of synthesizing all the facts of Jackson’s life into such a rich narrative.

A Rather Haunted Life is an excellent, highly readable biography of my favorite author, Shirley Jackson. It seems to have some real buzz, which is fabulous, as all modern day buzz for Jackson related books = long overdue. While I loved the 1988 biography Private Demons by Judy Oppenheimer, here Ruth Franklin takes a more rigorous, almost academic approach; she in fact presents as her thesis that Jackson’s writing acted as a sort of barometer to the fears and anxieties of women—especially housewives—during mid-twentieth century America; a proto-feminist, she created what Franklin calls “Domestic Horror.” I think this is an astute observation, and speaks to the fact that the mostly male (read sexist) arbiters of what is called the Literary Canon generally ignored or dismissed Jackson’s work after her death at age 48 in 1965. Despite this, Jackson was a very successful writer during her lifetime: penning the instantly immortal short story “The Lottery,” and bestselling, critically acclaimed novels like The Haunting of Hill House (for which she was nominated for the National Book Award) and We Have Always Lived in The Castle. She made her mark.

One thing with which I was taken aback was the highly negative assessment of Jackson’s husband, the noted critic Stanley Edgar Hyman. Though I knew from Oppenheimer’s book that Hyman could be an exasperatingly demanding and unfaithful spouse, Franklin-who had access to previously unavailable writings and personal correspondence-discloses that Jackson was far more resentful and emotionally battered by his critiques, demands and misbehavior than had previously been revealed, and had strongly entertained thoughts of leaving him through many years of their marriage. The scenario of leaving one’s established, shackled life for the freedom of the unknown thus played out in much of Jackson’s fiction, notably in such short stories as “Louisa Please Come Home,” “The Beautiful Stranger,” and “A Day in The Jungle,” as well as the unfinished novel Come Along with Me. (All fiction writing is autobiographical to some degree or another.) It broke my heart a little to know the depth to which Jackson was conflicted in her partnership with Hyman, despite their strong personal/professional bonds. Through her convincing, contextualized literary analysis, Franklin brings her subject to full, sympathetic, and fascinating life. I enjoyed A Rather Haunted Life very much and was genuinely sorry to see it end. If I have time I may write a more official review for Rain Taxi, but for now trust me, Shirley fans: you want to read this book. Five stars. ...more

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Oct 21, 2016 tortoise dreams rated it liked it

A biography of the too often overlooked American writer Shirley Jackson (1916-65), author of "The Lottery," The Haunting of Hill House, and other tales of a damaged psyche.

Nonfiction Review: Despite the recent renewal of her reputation (all her major work seems to be in print) Shirley Jackson is one of the most underrated authors of the 20th Century, so I much anticipated this new biography by Ruth Franklin. Unfortunately, I was disappointed and this is not the definitive volume I hoped for. To A biography of the too often overlooked American writer Shirley Jackson (1916-65), author of "The Lottery," The Haunting of Hill House, and other tales of a damaged psyche.

Nonfiction Review: Despite the recent renewal of her reputation (all her major work seems to be in print) Shirley Jackson is one of the most underrated authors of the 20th Century, so I much anticipated this new biography by Ruth Franklin. Unfortunately, I was disappointed and this is not the definitive volume I hoped for. To paraphrase Franklin herself: I am impressed by the amount of work that has gone into the book, but am underwhelmed by its argument.

Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life reads as if Ruth Franklin wanted to write a biography of Jackson's husband, critic Stanley Hyman, found no takers, so decided to turn it into a biography of Jackson. There are still, however, long stretches devoted solely to Hyman, and Franklin is his strong defender despite Hyman's obvious cruelties to his wife. There are large chunks of the book in which Jackson is only an afterthought, as Hyman and other of Franklin's preoccupations are discussed. This could have been a better and more effective biography of Jackson at 300 to 350 pages, cutting the irrelevant bits (ironic, as she notes Jackson's advice to "avoid anything extraneous to the narrative"). Although Franklin fails to acknowledge the prior major biography of Jackson, Private Demons: The Life of Shirley Jackson by Judy Oppenheimer (1988), in the text (it's mentioned in the notes), that book is warmer, more alive, more affectionate, and more satisfying; Franklin also fails to include some of the invaluable revelations about Jackson contained in that volume. As this book was written with significant help from Jackson's children, it's uncertain how much she chose not to publish because of that assistance (she states they read the manuscript before publication, but "ceded approval of its final version"). Despite Franklin's own interviews and access to new documents, the book ends suddenly, leaving questions unanswered, and it's unclear whether Franklin tried to answer them. There are curious silences in this book (there is also no bibliography or list of supplemental commentaries or references).

At times it seems this was too big a project and the writing suffers for it, perhaps more editing was needed. Some anecdotes are repeated two or three times, and the many detours away from Jackson's life are distracting and unhelpful. Plot summaries of Jackson's works can be inaccurate, or plots given only a single interpretation, when other views are equally likely. The author often makes value judgments and conjectures wildly about rape, bigotry, and the like, providing little or no evidence to support her opinions and theories. Better to let the reader decide, rather than merely speculate. At one point Franklin asks, "What is witchcraft, after all, but the desire to generate fear in others and instill their obedience?" Well, that's not my understanding of witchcraft. Later Franklin writes, "Witchcraft ... was important to Jackson for what it symbolized: female strength and potency." Female strength is generating fear and instilling obedience?

Franklin's take on situations is frequently questionable. In one novel, when a mentally disabled girl seeking art to decorate their shabby house mistakenly orders pornographic pictures, Franklin finds this to be one of the book's "wonderful moments of humor." Mocking the disabled is not what Jackson, always sensitive to outcasts, would find humorous. But admittedly Franklin finds much more levity (as opposed to incisive satire) in Jackson's writing than I do. She finds Jackson's novel about multiple personality disorder her "most overtly comic novel," but another novel is her "funniest." In yet another, a character I only found annoying and offensive, is described as "comic relief." I know I don't have a great sense of humor, but this is puzzling if you've read all Jackson's novels. At one point, after a large meal together, a friend of Jackson and Hyman wrote that "they got up hungry." Franklin, doubting this, asks, "How could he know?" Gosh, maybe they said, "I'm still hungry" when they rose from the table. Later, a Catholic girl "probably did not consider abortion." Stupid Catholics. Why speculate if you don't know? At some points Franklin takes Jackson's statements at face value, and other times notes that Jackson took "liberties with the factual record." There's also a constant reliance on Betty Friedan as the only feminist writer worth quoting (nine times), though she later criticizes Friedan as myopic. Her take on the great writer Ralph Ellison is also arguable.

There are spots in A Rather Haunted Life where the writing seems immature. I've not read serious biographers who rely on exclamation points to make a point. After one of Hyman's repeated infidelities, Jackson refrains from sending him an angry letter and then suffers a throat infection. Franklin writes, "the metaphorical connection is too rich to ignore ... after choking back the words ... she fell ill with a swollen throat!" But it was a letter she failed to send, not a conversation. At another point Franklin notes that Jackson "no longer had to fight for her turn at the typewriter. Of course, she also had a baby to take care of!" Was that a surprise? But then Franklin undercuts her own excitement by saying, "she also seemed to have derived imaginative energy from the constraints" of being a housewife. Franklin will also provide a quote, and then tell us what we should think about it: that it was "not especially kindly," "wrote sourly," "wrote sadly," "commented, unhelpfully," "wrote insultingly," "wrote cheerfully," "wrote snidely," a "snide line," "condescending caption," "responded huffily," "unkindly described," etc., etc. But when reading the quote, those statements were not necessarily sad, snide, sour. Again, better to let readers think for themselves, because sometimes her adverbs seem askew.

A careful, thoughtful reader of this book will find much to question. All of these points may seem minor individually, but so many flawed opinions and dubious value judgments can make the reader doubt the lens through which the narrative was filtered, challenge the reporting and interpretation. A close reading shows that the author's preferences are never far from the surface and considered equally important as Jackson herself, or why so many tangents away from the subject.

Franklin tries to pigeonhole Jackson's writing, with which Jackson would have disagreed, as her concerns were broad and universal, investigating "the demon in the mind," the damaged psyche. Jackson wrote that her work was "one long documentation of anxiety." But despite major reservations, although I didn't enjoy it, I'm still glad I read A Rather Haunted Life. Together with Judy Oppenheimer's better biography, it's a contribution to our knowledge and understanding of the too much underappreciated Shirley Jackson; it just isn't the definitive summation that Jackson deserves. What is still needed, what I'd hoped to read, is something like the controversial but wonderful biography of poet Anne Sexton by Diane Wood Middlebrook . [3★] ...more

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May 07, 2020 Teresa rated it really liked it · review of another edition

3.5

I don’t read many biographies of writers, but when I do, I’m interested in the time, place, and people that influenced who they were and how that affected their writing. In Shirley Jackson’s case, the people were her mother and her husband, two strong individuals who demanded her conformity. If she partially gave into their demands—nothing she did was good enough for her mother, who represented conventional thinking and so-called Society—this biography shows how all of Jackson’s writings, inc ...more

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Apr 16, 2017 Louise rated it it was amazing

Shelves: writers, biography

This book was on so many “Best” lists of 2016 that I had to take notice. I relish a big thick well researched biography, and I was not disappointed.

Shirley grew up in a growing and wealthy suburb of San Francisco, an area which her maternal forbears helped develop and had profited from. Her father was hardworking and upwardly mobile rising to a CEO status that took the family to Rochester NY in Shirley’s late teens. Unfortunately for Shirley, she was not born the petite debutante that flourishes This book was on so many “Best” lists of 2016 that I had to take notice. I relish a big thick well researched biography, and I was not disappointed.

Shirley grew up in a growing and wealthy suburb of San Francisco, an area which her maternal forbears helped develop and had profited from. Her father was hardworking and upwardly mobile rising to a CEO status that took the family to Rochester NY in Shirley’s late teens. Unfortunately for Shirley, she was not born the petite debutante that flourishes in her mother’s world and her mother never let her forget it. Shirley was emotionally abused at home and at school.

She was finally able to leave the home of her parental abusers when her father OK’d a transfer from the University of Rochester to Syracuse University. She achieved academically, finally had a trusted female friend, edited a literary magazine and met Stanley Hyman. In great offense to her parents (they being anti-Semitic and he being Jewish) she, at age 24, married him in 1940.

He was as much a bully as her parents. He forced her to accept his many infidelities, abdicated any responsibilities for the (4) children and hogged the family’s one typewriter. Despite time pressures and emotional battering (from Stanley, her mother and manuscript rejections) she slowly got some notice and her writing career grew (while Stanley’s, as a critic and academic, stalled). When her short stories started fetching $2,000 each, Stanley begrudged the time she was not writing.

Franklin shows how Shirley’s work reflects her personal life and while not considered political or feminist, her characters are a realistic portrayal of outsiders, minorities and women in the 1950’s world of conformity. For “Good Housekeeping” (appropriate to the times title) and similar glossies she writes of her children. While the stories are humorous, they often had a twist showing the pecking order or an unresolved issue of childhood. For the higher brow, stories such as “The Lottery” showed how groups can be orderly and polite without challenging a nasty underlying purpose.

You think of all the 1950’s housewives who, like Shirley, had to contend with a society that enabled husbands such as Stanley to dominate. Women who entered careers had to be very talented, brave and have strong social support. Shirley was enormously talented but it may have taken her best seller status to finally give her the bravery to confront her abusers. Franklin shows how Shirley was thinking about taking on her mother and was hinting that she was leaving. Was she really planning to escape the ungrateful Stanley (only 2 kids at home now) or did she know she was dying?

There were a lot of primary sources for author Ruth Franklin to work with: Shirley’s journal, drafts with notes, letters, and responses and interviews. The information is presented in a way that shows its relevance to her life. Transitions are smooth. The stories and novels are discussed, many with “spoilers”. The photos (all b & w) are good, but not all are on the appropriate page. The Index worked for me.

I’d have liked to know more about her children and how Stanley (who all too soon after Shirley’s death, married a former student 20+ years younger) fared with his children and his life.

I’ll have to read some Jackson novels.

This definitely earns its place on the “Best” lists. ...more

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Mar 01, 2017 ALLEN rated it it was ok

A disappointing book. Author Ruth Franklin begins with the premise that talented and accomplished author Shirley Jackson was a highly unhappy individual, and given the fact that she developed addictions to liquor, cigarettes, "diet" pills and even chocolate, then died at age 48 of heart failure in 1965, grossly overweight, that's not a difficult case to assert. It is, however, a tougher case to prove. Shirley Jackson succeeded at almost everything to which she put her mind, be it mystery short s A disappointing book. Author Ruth Franklin begins with the premise that talented and accomplished author Shirley Jackson was a highly unhappy individual, and given the fact that she developed addictions to liquor, cigarettes, "diet" pills and even chocolate, then died at age 48 of heart failure in 1965, grossly overweight, that's not a difficult case to assert. It is, however, a tougher case to prove. Shirley Jackson succeeded at almost everything to which she put her mind, be it mystery short stories, intense novels, cultural milestones like "The Lottery," still widely anthologized, and her curious, satiric send-ups of Fifties life with small kids in a small town in Vermont (Bennington, where the college is), LIFE AMONG THE SAVAGES and RAISING DEMONS. Toward the end of her life she maintained an active (and lucrative) lecturing schedule and continued to throw "wing-ding" parties for her neighbors and the town's intelligentsia at which her firebrand husband (critic and professor Stanley Hyman) argued loudly and long into the night in sharp contrast to the mild-mannered soul portrayed in the life-with-kids comedies.

What adds interest but also hampers the overall motion of this biography is author Ruth Franklin's chronic motif that Shirley Jackson's life is to be viewed through the lens of modern "difference" feminism, fifty years after her death. Thus at times the reader will wonder how and why so much authorial effort was expended to "true" Jackson's life in terms of Sixties feminist writing, such as Betty Friedan's THE FEMININE MYSTIQUE (first published two years before Jackson's death), or the extent to which she was involved in white witchcraft -- an assertion which would certainly have shocked Jackson's husband, the Bennington townsfolk who considered her odd but hardly pagan, her four children, or even her readers.

In essence A RATHER HAUNTED LIFE, while not an unworthy book, is often a surprisingly inapposite one. After reading Judy Oppenheimer's 1998 bio of the deceased author, PRIVATE DEMONS, I was certainly quite aware of the earlier traumas and continuing stresses of this overachieving author, wife and mother's life and had hoped for more in a purely biographical vein. Yet, while there is plenty of room for secondary sources, I find it a pity that her four children, now all in their sixties and seventies and all alive, received so little personal attention in the compilation of this book.

Will A RATHER HAUNTED LIFE hold interest for motivated readers? If you are interested in Shirley Jackson's lives, both literary and personal, the answer has to be yes. (Though I still think Judy Oppenheimer's PRIVATE DEMONS is the better place to start.) Might you feel that a great opportunity to turn over more stones of her existence has been lost amid the welter of armchair discourse at five decades' remove? If you're like me, the answer is also yes. So read the book if you're interested, but if you think it involves more work to get at Shirley Jackson's life than is strictly necessary, I won't disagree with you.

Private Demons: The Life of Shirley Jackson ...more

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Sep 22, 2018 Susan rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

I have long been a fan of Shirley Jackson’s writing and was intrigued to read her latest biography. To my shame, this has been on my TBR list for ever and I am so glad that I finally managed to get to it. I have read a previous biography of Jackson – “Private Demons: The Life of Shirley Jackson,” by Judy Oppenheimer and it seems odd that there was no other attempt to look at her life, and work, since that volume, in the late 1980’s. Thankfully, both the biographies I have read have been excellen I have long been a fan of Shirley Jackson’s writing and was intrigued to read her latest biography. To my shame, this has been on my TBR list for ever and I am so glad that I finally managed to get to it. I have read a previous biography of Jackson – “Private Demons: The Life of Shirley Jackson,” by Judy Oppenheimer and it seems odd that there was no other attempt to look at her life, and work, since that volume, in the late 1980’s. Thankfully, both the biographies I have read have been excellent and this one is certainly well researched, well written and looks at both her life, and writing, in depth.

Ruth Franklin looks at Jackson’s family history, before moving on to the marriage of Shirley’s parents. Shirley had a very difficult relationship with her mother, Geraldine, throughout her life. Her relationship with her mother was a central one, as was her relationship to her husband, Stanley Hyman. Franklin does a good job of explaining how Geraldine’s constant belittling of her daughter, conditioned Shirley to accept aspects of her marriage which she found difficult – including Stanley’s womanising.

Throughout her life, Shirley was full of conflict and contradictions. She wrote novels, and stories, which readers found disturbing and scary. Yet, she also wrote two volumes of family memoirs, which were comparably light-hearted and self-effacing. She loved her children, but chafed at the demands society made upon her as a wife and mother. She met Stanley in 1938 and he was very much a man of his time –unable even to make coffee and leaving the brunt of the housework (something which bored Shirley terribly) and childcare to his wife.

Although Stanley was a critic and book reviewer, as well as a successful teacher, Shirley out-earned him from a fairly early stage in their marriage, which suggested their household was not quite as typical as the times demanded. Also, for anyone who thinks that ‘the good old days,’ were full of charm and neighbourly companionship, then Jackson’s life, as well as her writing, will disabuse you of this idea. There are mentions of children throwing stones at Jackson, as she pushed a baby carriage, and even of someone hitting Shirley and Stanley’s son with a car, as the couple were viewed with disfavour by locals. Anti-Semitism, racism, unpleasant letters (reminiscent of pre-internet trolls), bullying teachers, locals who stick together – and turn their backs on their neighbours – show clearly where some of Jackson’s inspiration came from.

I really found this a fascinating book and feel it really helped me to understand Jackson’s work. I have refrained from reading all of her books, and stories, as I am loathe to finish them all. Without doubt, “We have always lived in the Castle,” is my favourite Jackson novel and I think she was simply brilliant – sharp, witty and delightfully dark. If you have already read the Oppenheimer book then be assured that this does have new material; including some very insightful correspondence that Jackson had with fans of her books, friends and family. Overall, I am very glad that I have read this and look forwards to reading, and re-reading, more by Jackson herself.

...more

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Dec 20, 2016 Beth Bonini rated it it was amazing

Shelves: nonfiction, mothers, biography, haunted-houses, mental-health, marriage

Throughout her writing career, Shirley Jackson's output tended to take seemingly quite disparate forms: either domestic comedy, as exemplified by Life Among the Savages and the many short pieces she wrote for women's magazines during the late 1940s and 1950s, or the psychologically probing 'horror' stories responsible for her enduring literary fame. During her lifetime, many reviewers (and presumably readers) were apparently confused by her ability to switch between these genres; what biographer Throughout her writing career, Shirley Jackson's output tended to take seemingly quite disparate forms: either domestic comedy, as exemplified by Life Among the Savages and the many short pieces she wrote for women's magazines during the late 1940s and 1950s, or the psychologically probing 'horror' stories responsible for her enduring literary fame. During her lifetime, many reviewers (and presumably readers) were apparently confused by her ability to switch between these genres; what biographer Ruth Franklin does so admirably is unify the two sides of Jackson's writing (ergo, personality).

In a chapter called "Garlic in Fiction," Franklin refers to the title of a lecture that Jackson gave about using symbols or motifs strongly but sparingly . . . rather like using a bit of garlic to flavour a dish. Franklin has used her own motifs in this biography: mothers, houses, witches and means of escape. Franklin argues, with unprecedented access to Jackson's private notebooks, letters and manuscripts, that these are the themes that formed Shirley Jackson - both as a person and an artist. I was very interested in Jackson as a person, but if you are interested primarily in the work there is plenty of insightful analysis of both in this biography.

Jackson was a huge personality and talent, both strong-willed and charismatic, but she had the misfortune in life of being undermined by the two people who ideally should have been her biggest supporters: her mother and her husband. One gets a strong sense of Jackson as a force of nature with a mother who would really prefer her to be slim, well-coiffed, submissive and just the same as everyone else. Jackson was way too big, in every sense, to be the ideal housewife and mother of the 1950s. Throughout their lives - and Jackson's mother would outlive her - mother and daughter were in constant touch, but never achieved an authentic relationship. On one occasion, after her mother had criticised a publicity photograph of her, Jackson wrote a scathing retort - a kind of eff-off letter - but she never sent it. It is one of two unsent letters, the other being a letter to Jackson's husband explaining why their marriage would end, which just tore at my heart. Despite her success as a writer and a mother, despite her many friendships and her appetite for life, there was much anger in Jackson's life - and she turned almost all of it inwards, where it manifested itself in anxiety and depression, or she channelled into her work.

Ruth Franklin does her best to give an impartial view of Jackson's husband, literary critic and Bennington professor Stanley Hyman. He and Jackson were clearly intellectual equals, and he was a big believer in her writing talent. They also shared many other interests, book-collecting for one, and food, and jazz. Franklin is at pains to show that Hyman was a hugely talented and caring teacher - even a legendary one - but as a husband, he was pretty awful. He cheated repeatedly on jackson, with both students and friends; he expected her to do all of the housework and childcare; and most astonishingly of all, he tightly controlled the money in the household despite the fact that Jackson out-earned him nearly all of their married life together. They were both lavish spenders, particularly on their passions (food and books), and tended to outspend their earnings. I found it extremely upsetting, though, that Hyman constantly pressurised Jackson to write - and resented any writing that wasn't commercial in intent.

Franklin is quite adroit at fixing Jackson - and her sexist marriage - within the context of mid-century America. One gets the feeling that Jackson may have even worked up the courage to leave Stanley if she had lived longer. Shockingly, and tragically, she was only 44 when she died. Franklin also addresses the Cold War fears which were percolating at the time. Despite the snugness and prosperity of 1950s America, there was a lot of corrosive anxiety at work in the internal structure. Again, Franklin places Jackson's life and writing firmly within the time she lived. There is a picture of Jackson that makes me think of my grandmother, both in positive and negative ways. Reading this biography felt very personal to me. It's a familiar landscape, with a generational (or two) remove. It certainly raised my feminist hackles - whilst giving me much compassion and admiration for its subject. ...more

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Apr 25, 2017 Lauren rated it really liked it

Shelves: biography

A smoothly written tour through the complex emotional life--and busy outer life--of Shirley Jackson, a particular favorite of mine. Franklin approaches Jackson evenhandedly, with just the little bit of partisanship that it's best for a biographer to have for their subject, and she selects her incidents well. The most dreadful sign in a biography is a lengthy section describing the person's childhood or, worse, the childhood of their great-grandparents, but Franklin handles both Jackson's family A smoothly written tour through the complex emotional life--and busy outer life--of Shirley Jackson, a particular favorite of mine. Franklin approaches Jackson evenhandedly, with just the little bit of partisanship that it's best for a biographer to have for their subject, and she selects her incidents well. The most dreadful sign in a biography is a lengthy section describing the person's childhood or, worse, the childhood of their great-grandparents, but Franklin handles both Jackson's family history and her earliest years briskly and efficiently and concentrates mostly on the duration of her career and her fascinating marriage to critic Stanley Hyman.

Jackson's career is an intriguing, bumpy story, illustrative of the odd routes writers can take to success. For years, despite the infamy brought to her by the publication of "The Lottery," one of the finest and most chilling short stories ever written, Jackson got most of her money, and a fair bit of her renown, from the "family stories" she published in women's magazines and her funny, sardonic memoirs of hectic housekeeping and motherhood. That combination perplexed and even annoyed some of her contemporaries, and I like that Franklin largely rolls her eyes at that: yes, Jackson could do more than one style very, very well. But that "cross-contamination" followed her throughout her publishing history, with interviews playing up her supposed spookiness or else being shocked by her ordinariness while reviewers took potshots at her "wasting her time" with the family stories, which they considered frivolities. It's probably not Jackson's ability to write across genre lines that's surprising now so much as her ability to make a very good living off short story publications and continue to be regarded as a literary success even though it took multiple novels for her to start earning back her advances, let alone getting royalties.

In addition to the fun of the inside baseball, Franklin also provides valuable analysis of the stories and novels themselves. She takes different critical paths than I would--it's my own folly to be annoyed by biographical criticism while reading a literary biography, so that's on me, at least--and she's sometimes dismissive of genre, and insistent that Jackson "transcends" it, but despite those occasional places of disagreement, I found her approaches interesting and illuminating. She's attentive to the more minor novels and the short stories as well as to the major works, as well, and that gives a fuller sense of Jackson's writing.

The only persistent quibble I had with the book is Franklin's treatment of Jackson's mother, Geraldine, who is essentially never mentioned without a side-swipe at her "carping" or "belittling," and whose remarks are always interpreted in the worst possible light. To be fair, there are a few excerpts from Geraldine's letters to her daughter that are almost cartoonishly awful--mostly concerning Jackson's weight--but they don't seem like enough reason to view the woman's every assertion as passive-aggressive and to constantly link every snobbish woman in Jackson's stories with her mother. Stanley Hyman receives a much fuller and more complex portrait here as a brilliant, loving, and very flawed man who had a firm belief in his wife's art but who nevertheless sometimes belittled and bullied her (in their later years, he remonstrated her for writing letters or anything else that wouldn't bring in money) and cheated on her as a matter of routine. Franklin takes him to task for his faults but celebrates his virtues and his better moments, and there's even a genuine tearjerker in the mention that after Jackson's death, he was unable to continue using the yellow paper they had always shared. Some of that sense of psychological richness and understanding could have rubbed off on Geraldine, as well.

That richness is given over consistently to Shirley Jackson, however, and it makes for a very readable, pleasurable biography, even as Franklin reaches the more difficult passages in Jackson's life, like her onset of agoraphobia and her health problems. The ultimate impression is of a deeply smart woman with deep feelings that she could only sometimes express, either because of innate and trained reserve or because no one was willing to listen. It's our good luck that she was able to translate that sense of dark, disconcerting undercurrents beneath placid ordinariness into some genuinely superb fiction. ...more

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Jul 13, 2020 Lee rated it really liked it

4.5

'Eleanor awakens in the night to hear a voice babbling in the next room and clutches at the hand of Theodora, sleeping beside her. The voice turns into the cry of a child, sobbing, “Please don’t hurt me. Please let me go home.” She screams; the lights go on, and she sees that Theodora is not next to her after all, but in bed across the room. “God God,” Eleanor says, “whose hand was I holding?”

If this, as Jackson wrote in her notes on one of the drafts, is the “key line” of the novel, what do ...more

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Oct 23, 2019 Susan Albert rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: women-s-issues, biography, author-bios

My experience of Shirley Jackson began with her two memoirs, Life Among the Savages (1952) and Raising Demons (1957), both genuinely funny, clever, and endearing. I discovered them when I was a young mom with small children, just learning how to write and wanting a writing career. Especially in those books, Jackson seemed like a perfect--and perfectly inspiring--model. I met the "other" Jackson--the Jackson of "The Lottery," The Haunting of Hill House, and We Have Always Lived in the Castle--muc My experience of Shirley Jackson began with her two memoirs, Life Among the Savages (1952) and Raising Demons (1957), both genuinely funny, clever, and endearing. I discovered them when I was a young mom with small children, just learning how to write and wanting a writing career. Especially in those books, Jackson seemed like a perfect--and perfectly inspiring--model. I met the "other" Jackson--the Jackson of "The Lottery," The Haunting of Hill House, and We Have Always Lived in the Castle--much later, and found the light and dark aspects of this fragmented, complicated woman very difficult to reconcile.

Ruth Franklin has made sense of Shirley Jackson for me. In a biography that is detailed and nuanced without ever losing the story line, Franklin pulls together all the various dimensions of a multi-dimensional character who doesn't fit the two-dimensional world she lives in. She shows us a writer (also a mother and wife) who is beset by her own personal demons, raised in a culture that can't adequately recognize or value her talents, married to a man who has to belittle his wife in order to boost himself, writing for editors and readers who admired her virtuosity but were bewildered by the meaning of her serious work. Given all these pushing-pulling forces, it is no wonder that Jackson's creative work takes such complex forms or was so little understood in her lifetime--and rather better understood now.

One of the things I like best about Franklin's biography is the way she sets her subject into her time and place. We women who were painfully wedged between the fixed gender expectations of the 1950s and the Second Wave feminism of the uncertain 1960s can recognize ourselves in Jackson's fiction, Franklin says, for it is “nothing less than the secret history of American women of her era.” Jackson's magazine fiction brings us the cheery misadventures of a mom raising four independent-minded children in an impossible-to-manage old house. Her novels and many of her stories offer a macabre Gothic vision in which girls and women are captured (both literally and metaphorically) by houses from which there is no escape, by families in which there is no survival, by desires for which there is no consummation. Between these poles, Franklin asks, where are women to find themselves?

Franklin's biography helped me make sense not only of Jackson's psychological contradictions but of two puzzling decades in my own life, when I was trying to manage the contradictory responsibilities of being a mother, a wife, a student, a writer. For that, and for its clear and consistent reading of Jackson's often baffling work and its appreciation of Jackson's pared-down prose, I am grateful.

Highly recommended.
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Nov 26, 2017 Amanda rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: non-fiction

I really enjoyed listening to the audiobook of this biography. It is organized somewhat chronologically, with each chapter dealing with a work of Jackson's and a general theme in her life. There are lots of spoilers for her works, but that didn't bother me even though I've read nothing by Jackson. This an important work discussing women torn between their identities as workers and mothers because of societal expectations and judgements. ...more

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Aug 25, 2016 Betty rated it it was ok

Too many tangents.
reflections: When I was a teenager, Shirley Jackson was a huge part of my literary upbringing. Back then, I read everything about her as well as by her. So I was eager to read her biography.

The author of Jackson's newest biography gives a too-long chapter: "Foundations" about Jackson's ancestors. The chapter explains why she wrote spooky stories about haunted houses. Her maternal ancestors were architects of mansions in California and fans of the supernatural such as the Ouija ...more

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Nov 12, 2016 Randee rated it it was amazing

Shelves: biography

Shirley Jackson is one of my personal top five favorite writers. Some books come to us in a moment of time that pack such a powerful punch or so sharply define something that puts us in touch with our inner core that they are magical, timeless and revered. Shirley Jackson came to me when I was in grade 7...the middle of middle school. I can't remember if I read 'We Have Always Lived in the Castle' or 'The Haunting of Hill House' first. I can actually see my 12 year old self, lying across my bed ...more

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Mar 27, 2018 Jeanette added it · review of another edition

Shelves: abandoned

No rating. The book is decent but it's filled with tangents and more about her husband's work/ onus, IMHO than I have interest to know. Also the core of Shirley's personality and papers is so off-putting to me that I don't find much more of her "depth" or why she is always so defensive- while reading such lengths of her whines and dissatisfaction. She also lead such a privileged life in a time when most were literally starving that I find her blindness to any of her luckier placement realization ...more

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Jan 23, 2017 Melora marked it as abandoned

Okay, on page 114 out of 500 pages of text (not counting the notes), and I'm abandoning this, at least for now. I recently really enjoyed Jackson's short novels, We Have Always Lived in the Castle and The Haunting of Hill House, and of course I read The Lottery when I was in high school, and this biography of the author seemed intriguing. I was interested in the fact that she was famous for her humorous magazine stories about family life, which were published in women's magazines in the 50's (an Okay, on page 114 out of 500 pages of text (not counting the notes), and I'm abandoning this, at least for now. I recently really enjoyed Jackson's short novels, We Have Always Lived in the Castle and The Haunting of Hill House, and of course I read The Lottery when I was in high school, and this biography of the author seemed intriguing. I was interested in the fact that she was famous for her humorous magazine stories about family life, which were published in women's magazines in the 50's (and later gathered in Life Among the Savages and Raising Demons), as well as for her unsettling stories and novels delving into superstitious, cruel aspects of the human psyche. I supposed that this would explore the elements in her life, reading, friendships, etc. that led to such an odd juxtaposition. And maybe it does, but at this point I've been bogged down for what seems like forever in the unappealing details of Jackson's early years with her (not yet) husband, Stanley Hyman, and I can't take any more. The earlier part of this book was somewhat interesting -- I really liked the family history stories involving architects and the strange houses they built, and felt like it gave insight into the weird house in The Haunting of Hill House. Moving on to Jackson's life, though, things became increasingly dull. She does not come across as a pleasant or kind person, but her unappealingness is nothing compared with that of Stanley Hyman. The author, unfortunately, includes excessively intimate details from his letters (as well as one of his truly execrable poems!) in which he describes to Shirley, his then-girlfriend, his sordid sexual exploits. It was at the description of how he kept Shirley's birth control device, a "pessary", while they were apart for the summer, and showed the thing off to friends (I had a horrible fear that I was going to read about how he let the other women he slept with use it, since Franklin explains that such devices were hard to obtain, but either he didn't or at least not yet) that I remembered that I don't have to read any more of this. I bought the dang thing, but at this point I'm wasting time as well as money. So. I may pick this up again sometime, particularly if I enjoy Life Among the Savages, which is in my TBR stack. Jackson is a powerful writer, and perhaps if I try this again I'll skip forward a bit to her family years. ...more

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Mar 20, 2017 Linda rated it really liked it

Shelves: non-fiction, biography

I’m about to devote the majority of this review of a 600+ page book to a single chapter, which describes public reaction to the publication in The New Yorker of Jackson’s short story “The Lottery.” I can’t help it, because I was equal parts stunned and amused by what seemed to be only two categories of responses: a) What in tarnation does this story mean? And b) Is it fact, or fiction? The latter was explained in part by Franklin—at the time, The New Yorker did not label stories as fiction or no
I’m about to devote the majority of this review of a 600+ page book to a single chapter, which describes public reaction to the publication in The New Yorker of Jackson’s short story “The Lottery.” I can’t help it, because I was equal parts stunned and amused by what seemed to be only two categories of responses: a) What in tarnation does this story mean? And b) Is it fact, or fiction? The latter was explained in part by Franklin—at the time, The New Yorker did not label stories as fiction or non-fiction. (But still. To mistake the story for gonzo journalism seems bizarre.)

Keep in mind that my history with short stories is a contentious one. In the early grades, my school used reading textbooks filled with short stories, or short excerpts of novels. That taught me that short fiction is followed 90% of the time by a half-dozen really dumb study questions and/or a quiz. In high school, my weary English teacher sighed at yet another generation of teenagers who had no idea what the Montresor coat of arms symbolized in “The Cask of Amontillado.” By the time I finished the short story literature class as an undergraduate, I was personally finished with the form. I found them all (with very few exceptions) maddening, opaque, obscure, and pretentious.

Fast forward mumblety-six years to my newfound interest in Shirley Jackson. Every online biography referred to “The Lottery” as one of her most well-known and significant pieces. Okay, I’ll read it, I thought, but only for you, dear Shirley. Imagine my delight and surprise when I understood it immediately. Hey! I know exactly what happened in this story! I know precisely what kind of town it’s set in, and I think I even know some of the characters in real life!

It just figures that the one short story that I understood immediately was a story that was famous for people not understanding it.

Anyhoo…

This was a very long book, but I did not find it a struggle to finish, and whenever I had to put it down, I was always eager to get back to it. Jackson is a tremendously fascinating figure. She evidently did not identify as a feminist, but her writing includes some of the most feminist prose I’ve ever read. As a housewife in the era for which June Cleaver was the shining ideal, she cared for four children with seemingly no help from her husband even as she earned most of the household income with her writing. Shirley was a woman who believed in demons—metaphorical, if not literal. While her death at age 49 was an undeniable tragedy, the same demons that dogged her into an early grave were the ones that inspired her razor-sharp writing, and without them, I’m not sure we’d have any of the works considered to be her masterpieces. I only wish her talents had been as recognized and appreciated during her lifetime as they became decades after her death.
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Nov 26, 2018 Richard Moss rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: 2018

I only came to Shirley Jackson two years ago when I read We Have Always Lived in the Castle. It instantly became one of my favourite reads, and it probably has the best opening paragraph ever written.

But what mind could produce a work so moving and affecting, and yet also strange and disturbing? Many of the answers are contained in this superlative biography of the all-too short life of Shirley Jackson.

Ruth Franklin has unearthed some tremendous detail about Jackson's childhood and marriage, as I only came to Shirley Jackson two years ago when I read We Have Always Lived in the Castle. It instantly became one of my favourite reads, and it probably has the best opening paragraph ever written.

But what mind could produce a work so moving and affecting, and yet also strange and disturbing? Many of the answers are contained in this superlative biography of the all-too short life of Shirley Jackson.

Ruth Franklin has unearthed some tremendous detail about Jackson's childhood and marriage, as well as insights into the personal and career struggles she faced.

She makes a convincing case for why her fiction and life represented the conflicts many women of that era faced.

Jackson had four children who she clearly loved and treasured. But husband Stanley Hyman was not always supportive. Serially unfaithful, he was typical of many 1950s men in his semi-detachment from domesticity. That didn't stop him pressuring Shirley to write though, as she quickly became the main breadwinner.

In many ways, Stanley's treatment of Shirley mirrors Jackson's difficult relationship with her mother, who would belittle her from birth to death.

She seems to have suffered some form of mental collapse as a teenager, before becoming agoraphobic in her last few years. She also often struggled with the pettiness of small-town life.

She did achieve tremendous success, and much critical praise during her lifetime, but at times the overwhelmingly male reviewers of the moment failed to understand her fiction. Beneath the strangeness, were plots that often explored the restrictions women of the 1950s faced. Her interest in witchcraft, made it easy to oversimplify her work - the classic back-handed compliment being the description of her writing with a broomstick rather than a pen. There is much more going on than just horror and ghosts.

Jackson died in her late 40s, not long after completing her two masterpieces - We Have Always Lived in the Castle and The Haunting of Hill House. Her short story The Lottery also remains a classic. But Franklin makes a case for the merits of all her work, and expertly reveals the private life that produced the fiction.

Haunted by self-doubt, it is of course a shame that Shirley Jackson cannot now see what high esteem she is held in. This brilliant biography successfully places her in the highest possible echelon of post-1945 American authors. ...more

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Feb 14, 2017 Rachel rated it liked it

This biography wavers between 2 1/2 stars and 3 stars for me but I'll be generous because I really liked the parts about Shirley Jackson. The book begins with her early life and later each chapter focuses on the period of her life during which she is writing one of her novels or stories. I really enjoyed reading about her writing process. Shirley Jackson is mostly known as being a horror writer but she also wrote humorous non-fiction stories about her family life and being a housewife in the 195 This biography wavers between 2 1/2 stars and 3 stars for me but I'll be generous because I really liked the parts about Shirley Jackson. The book begins with her early life and later each chapter focuses on the period of her life during which she is writing one of her novels or stories. I really enjoyed reading about her writing process. Shirley Jackson is mostly known as being a horror writer but she also wrote humorous non-fiction stories about her family life and being a housewife in the 1950's. Franklin uses this weird juxtaposition to argue that she was a "feminist author", a label that Jackson herself probably would not have used. The argument is an interesting one given that Jackson was more successful than her husband. Another thing I liked about this biography is that you got a real picture of a family with 2 working writers, including their successes and their struggles.
My issue with this book is that Franklin states early on that it is impossible to write about Shirley Jackson's life without writing about her husband, literary critic Stanley Hyman. There are large sections of the book that focus solely on Hyman's life. It's like reading a biography within a biography. Sometimes, these sections don't mention Jackson at all, like the parts about Hyman's early life. After Jackson and Hyman are married, he does seem to have an influence on Jackson's emotional state and her writing. Hyman actually comes off as a bit of an asshole, which made me sympathize with Jackson's emotional issues (she dealt with anxiety all her life and agoraphobia later) even more. Hyman comes off as seeming jealous that Jackson is more successful, and retaliates by putting pressure on her to always be writing something that could make money. Some of the stuff with Hyman feels like filler in a book that is almost 500 pages long. I think one more pass with editing would have brought the focus back to Jackson without cutting Hyman out entirely.
Shirley Jackson is one of my favorite authors. I love her mix of creepy and domestic fiction. She is one of the few horror writers often mentioned by male horror writers as an influence. Everytime I read one of her books, it makes me want to write something. I really think the way she dealt with her anxieties, was a wife and mother to 4 children and still found time to write as much as she did is inspiring. I wish Franklin had chosen to focus just on Jackson.

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Oct 06, 2016 V. Briceland rated it it was amazing

What elevates Ruth Franklin's examination of Shirley Jackson over the only previous full-length biography written about the author is Franklin's insightful criticism of Jackson's output. At the height of her career, Jackson's dual fame as both the deft craftswoman of eerie tales of human evil, as well as the droll raconteur of domestic comedy, managed to baffle many reviewers. Franklin, however, makes a convincing case for a more unified appreciation to Jackson's novels, memoirs, and abundant sh What elevates Ruth Franklin's examination of Shirley Jackson over the only previous full-length biography written about the author is Franklin's insightful criticism of Jackson's output. At the height of her career, Jackson's dual fame as both the deft craftswoman of eerie tales of human evil, as well as the droll raconteur of domestic comedy, managed to baffle many reviewers. Franklin, however, makes a convincing case for a more unified appreciation to Jackson's novels, memoirs, and abundant short stories. Just as Jackson's mordant sense of humor leavened even her most nail-biting passages of horror, at her funniest she consistently exercised the unblinking gaze of the alien observer.

Franklin links Jackson's themes to those explored by Betty Friedan in The Feminine Mystique—the widespread unhappiness and depression of women in post-war America. Certainly Jackson had plenty to be unhappy about, especially at home, as documented in Jackson's many journals and letters; her husband, critic Stanley Edgar Hyman, not only relied upon Jackson's writing for the bulk of their large family's source of income, but managed to make her feel guilty about any moment she spent not earning money with her typewriter . . . while he simultaneously refused to give her any help whatsoever with an overwhelming amount of housework and child rearing. Those pressures, along with his multiple thoughtless sexual indiscretions, seem to have triggered anxiety attacks and depression through Jackson's career. Franklin makes a compelling case that Jackson's late-life bout with agoraphobia after the nearly-universal rapturous reception of her final novel seems to have been triggered by the author having to swallow and internalize the betrayals she felt when Hyman began an affair with Jackson's best friend.

It's Jackson's writing that benefits the most from Franklin's biography, though. Franklin argues (quite successfully, I feel) for a re-evaluation of Jackson's under-appreciated fiction and memoirs not simply for the thrills and chuckles they elicit, but asks readers to consider them in both the greater historical and biographical context from which they sprang. Jackson's woman-centered worlds might touch upon mythic and universal archetypes, but each manages to be uniquely personal, as this compelling biography ably proves. ...more

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Feb 18, 2018 Val rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: read-in-2018, library, books-i-own

I learned a lot about Shirley Jackson, so I'm pretty pleased. ...more

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Jan 29, 2021 Raechel rated it really liked it

Shelves: non-fiction, biography

This is a fantastic biography, I knew very little about Jackson before I picked it up and Franklin does an amazing job of interweaving her work, her home life, and the different roles she had to play. Honestly, Jackson deserved better.

I also loved the (albeit it, brief) deeper look Franklin gave some of Jackson's literature. I'm a huge fan of Stephen King but have read only a little Jackson. Franklin's analysis made me realize how and why King shows his appreciation of Jackson's work through his ...more

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May 25, 2017 Christopher rated it really liked it

Shelves: american, non-fiction, 21st-century, audiobooks

You don't read a biography of someone like Shirley Jackson because she had a particularly exciting life. She didn't cure cancer or storm the beaches of Normandy. You read this type of biography to illuminate the artist's work. Does this book do that? I'm happy to report, yes!

Shirley Jackson is one of my very favorites. We Have Always Lived in the Castle is probably my very favorite book. So she is very near and dear to my heart, though before reading this biography, I didn't know a whole lot abo You don't read a biography of someone like Shirley Jackson because she had a particularly exciting life. She didn't cure cancer or storm the beaches of Normandy. You read this type of biography to illuminate the artist's work. Does this book do that? I'm happy to report, yes!

Shirley Jackson is one of my very favorites. We Have Always Lived in the Castle is probably my very favorite book. So she is very near and dear to my heart, though before reading this biography, I didn't know a whole lot about her. I had some vague notions that she was an anxious person, was married to a literary critic, dealt with agoraphobia later in life, and died too early from heart failure.

This biography traces her life as a parallel to her work. In the times concurrent with her early work, the author focuses on the way Shirley divided her personality between mother, husband, homemaker, and individual with her own personal and professional life, because that is a theme important to her early novels and stories. In the later novels in which a villainous matron features, the biographer delves into Shirley's own troubled relationship with her mother. There is a direct line drawn between Shirley's own agoraphobia and that of the Blackwood daughters in We Have Always Lived in the Castle. This is an approach that makes sense, especially for one reading the book for a greater understanding of Shirley Jackson's literature, but I imagine some of the most scrupulous and history-minded readers might accuse this approach of putting the cart before the horse, i.e. squeezing the subject's life to fit into the biographer's mold rather than letting the subject's life play out in biographical form naturally.

Perhaps most of all, this biography made me sad. Sad because Shirley died so young and deprived us of some great literature; sad because of the anxiety, agoraphobia, and other psychological distresses she suffered; sad because of the overbearing expectations of her mother, husband, and society that dictated that she had to be a good housekeeper, wife, and mother before she could think about being a good writer; and sad because there were so many outside and inside pressures on her that suppressed what was obviously a charming and clever woman.

Shirley Jackson spent much of her life defying categorization. The women's magazines wanted her to be a witty writer of columns about motherhood. Her reviewers wanted to her to fit neatly into one genre, either horror or suspense or Literature. Her husband wanted her to be various things at various times, depending on his mood: submissive wife, literary star, moneymaker, or quiet and unassuming housewife. In my mind, there is only one necessary category for Shirley Jackson, and that is Classic.

NOTE: There are plenty of spoilers for Jackson's work in the biography, so I wouldn't recommend reading it unless you've already read her work. I still have a couple of her books to go, but I was able to tune out when the plots of those books came up that I don't think it will affect my future reading. ...more

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Dec 03, 2016 Nina rated it did not like it

It's possible that if I hadn't previously read Judy Oppenheimer's excellent biography, Private Demons: The Life of Shirley Jackson I might have liked this book, but I doubt it. At nearly twice the length of the Oppenheimer book, one would have hoped for even more insight into Jackson, her life and her writings. Unfortunately the extra pages are devoted to what is essentially an unnecessarily extensive co-biography of Stanley Hyman, Jackson's husband, and various extended digressions on subjects ...more

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Mar 13, 2019 Diana M. Rodriguez rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: non-fiction

A fascinating biography of an incredibly talented writer. Shirley Jackson's life was not usual for her time. She was a prolific writer at a time when women were still described as housewives. She worked full time as a writer, all the while raising a rambunctious brood of children. Her husband sounds unbearable, overbearing, controlling, philandering, and not helpful raising the children or helping around the house. Poor Shirley.

I love the story of when she went to the hospital to give birth to ...more

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Mar 15, 2017 Sarah rated it really liked it

Shelves: writing, biography

A well focused and thoughtful biography of a fascinating writer. My only complaint was that the timeline was occasionally confusing, with chapters giving information then doubling back to catch up to that point again. I read this with a notebook beside me to keep track of all the stories I need to catch up on.

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Reading the 20th ...: Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life by Ruth Franklin (October 2018)	26	20	Oct 27, 2018 11:58PM
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About Ruth Franklin

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Trivia About Shirley Jackson: ...

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Quotes from Shirley Jackson: ...

“If one is bewildered and unhappy, why not show it, and why will not people explain and comfort? But instead—this pretense at calm satisfaction, where underneath there is all the seething restless desire to be off, away from all this anger at self and others, to where there are other conventions, other thoughts, other passions.” — 7 likes

“I have never liked the theory that poltergeists only come into houses where there are children, because I think it is simply too much for any one house to have poltergeists and children. —“The Ghosts of Loiret” — 4 likes

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