shirley jackson a rather haunted life by ruth franklin

Turreted, brooding, maternal, malevolent, these unforgettable structures are “the gravitational center of much of her fiction,” Franklin writes, and place her squarely within the Gothic tradition, where, of course, most people have been content to leave her. If you’re a Jackson fan, chances are you remember the houses described in her stories and novels. Ruth Franklin’s excellent Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life is all that and more. To truly reclaim a legacy, it generally helps to have a big, penetrating biography, one that takes into consideration everything that’s come before and pushes forward a new and improved interpretation. Articles and academic books only go so far in setting a record straight, however. Jackson’s most genuinely uncanny talent was the way in which she channeled the nation’s postwar tensions and hypocrisies-particularly those around class, race, gender, and anti-Semitism-into fiction so unputdownable that most readers don’t even see the cultural critique just beneath their noses. Such fun and games surely sold books, and yet, as a smattering of critics and scholars has pointed out over the decades, filing her under “horror writer” drastically undersells her contribution to American literature. Hocus-pocus puns were something of a professional liability for Jackson, thanks in no small part to her publishers, who eagerly played up her interest in black magic early jacket copy lauded her as “perhaps the only contemporary writer who is a practicing witch.” Jackson herself liked to tell her children she was born knowing how to read Tarot cards.

The sinister artistry of this “Virginia Werewolf among the séance-fiction writers,” as Time magazine campily called her in 1962, holds up. Holmes, and other notable enthusiasts celebrated the centennial of her birth with readings at New York’s Symphony Space. In 2010, the Library of America enlisted Joyce Carol Oates to honor Jackson with a best-of volume, and earlier this year Paul Giamatti, A. Fifty-one years after her death, nearly all of her books are in print, and her most celebrated works-“The Lottery,” possibly America’s most famous short story, and the novels The Haunting of Hill House, twice adapted for film, and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, which just went into production after years of stalling (talk about sating a renewed appetite for complicated female leads!)-continue to send chills down spines.

Shirley Jackson’s legacy might not seem in need of assistance.

Shirley jackson a rather haunted life by ruth franklin