Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life

by Ruth Franklin

Hardcover, 2016

Status

Checked out

Genres

Biography & Memoir

Biography

Publication

Liveright (2016), Edition: 1, 624 pages

Description

"Still known to millions only as the author of the "The Lottery," Shirley Jackson (1916-1965) remains curiously absent from the American literary canon. A genius of literary suspense, Jackson plumbed the cultural anxiety of postwar America better than anyone. Now, biographer Ruth Franklin reveals the tumultuous life and inner darkness of the author behind such classics as The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Placing Jackson within an American Gothic tradition of Hawthorne and Poe, Franklin demonstrates how her unique contribution to this genre came from her focus on "domestic horror" drawn from an era hostile to women. Based on a wealth of previously undiscovered correspondence and dozens of new interviews, Shirley Jackson, with its exploration of astonishing talent shaped by a damaged childhood and a troubled marriage to literary critic Stanley Hyman, becomes the definitive biography of a generational avatar and an American literary giant."--… (more)

Media reviews

Kirkus Review

Franklin astutely explores Jackson's artistry, particularly in her deceptively subtle stories. She also sees a bigger, more original picture of Jackson as the author of “the secret history of American women of her era”—postwar, pre-feminist women who, like her, were faced with limited choices

and trapped in bigoted, cliquish neighborhoods.... A consistently interesting biography that deftly captures the many selves and multiple struggles of a true American original.

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User reviews

LibraryThing member japaul22

I picked up this biography on a whim at my library and it has reinspired my interest in Shirley Jackson. This is a solid biography of Jackson. It spans her whole life and focuses on her troubled relationships with her mother and her philandering husband. The first third of the book focused a bit

too much on her husband for my taste, but then the author brings it solidly back to Jackson herself.

Franklin looks deeply at Shirley Jackson's writing - both her process and her overarching themes. She also spends a lot of time trying to decipher her mental health, which was something Jackson struggled with throughout her life. I also was interested to know that Jackson was a mother of four and did all of her writing while raising her children and supporting the family with her income. Her husband never brought in enough money for them to live on and her income was their primary source of money.

All in all, this is a decent biography of a fascinating person and writer. I'm excited to read the two remaining novels that I've not yet read in Jackson's oeuvre.

Original publication date: 2016
Author’s nationality: American
Original language: English
Length: 499 pages
Rating: 3.5 stars
Format/where I acquired the book: library book
Why I read this: on a whim

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LibraryThing member FrankErrington

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.

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LibraryThing member Jan.Coco.Day

“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality.” While that sounds like a perfect description of 2016, it is in fact the opening line of The Haunting of Hill House, Shirley Jackson’s 1959 National Book Award Finalist. For over half a century,

Jackson not only delighted us, and terrified us, (mostly because she delighted in what she feared), but she also made us empathize with intelligent women trapped in domesticity. Through her autobiographical essays and fiction, Jackson tilted the perspective of suburban domestic life into the light and into the darkness. Ruth Franklin, with access to previously undiscovered correspondence, writes a compassionate look into the life and work of an American icon who could strike to the heart of loneliness.

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LibraryThing member Schmerguls

5544. Shirley Jackson A Rather Haunted Life, by Ruth Franklin (read 21 Mar 2018) (National Book Critics Circle biography award for 2016) I have only read three of Shirley Jackson's books--Hangsaman, read 31 Aug 1952,, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, read 5 Jan 1963, and The Haunting of Hill

House, read 26 Nov 2001. But I read this biography because it won the National Book Critics Circle biography award for 2016. it is the 14th such winner I have read. The book tells well the sometimes difficult life that Shirley Jackson had (born 14 Dec 1916 in Sab Francisco, died 8 Aug 1965 in North Bennington, Vt.) and discusses all her books and mentions many of the over 200 short stories she wrote. She and her not too admirable husband had four children and had money troubles till Shirley became famous. But a life of an author who pays little attention to anything but her writing and her family is not excessively interesting. Her relation with her mother was not an easy one, and her husband had faults, especially in being faithful to his marriage vow. I found the book well worth reading and believe I will read some more of Jackson's work as a result of reading this. The text of the book is 499 pages, and it is notes and an index which bring the book up to 624 pages--so the book is not as big as one might think when seeing it is listed as a 624 page book.

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LibraryThing member lisapeet

Finally finished this, after a couple of library holds expired while I was in the middle. It was good but not gripping—she was an interesting character, and I'm always game for reading about that mid-century literary milieu, because I think of it as my parents' (at least in terms of cultural

influences), even though they were 10 years younger than Jackson and her husband, Stanley Edgar Hyman. Jackson and Hyman also wrote for The New Leader, where I worked for a few years in its last days in the early 2000s. Hyman's intellectual mansplaininess was grating, and I'm not sure I ever got the chemistry between them, but I don't doubt it existed. I sympathized with Jackson's balancing act between the expectations of being a 1950s/'60s mother and housewife and a novelist, but I didn't quite feel it... then again Ruth Franklin's documenting Jackson's story from her correspondence and journals—to which Jackson added her own spin—and other people's accounts, so that takes away a bit of the immediacy. So: interesting but not a must-read, unless you're a Jackson fanatic (I'm not).

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LibraryThing member flourgirl49

I've loved Shirley Jackson since I read "The Lottery" in high school - and I particularly enjoyed her two memoirs about raising her four kids. This book is a very comprehensive biography making use of archival material that has not been available before. I think it's time I dusted off all of my

Shirley Jackson books and read them again - it's been 40 years at least, and with the new insight I've gotten from this biography I will enjoy them even more this time around!

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LibraryThing member basilisksam

At least it encouraged me to go back to Jackson's writings but, despite the recommendations from Neil Gaiman and others on the dust jacket, I found this a tremendously tedious biography. I have been a big fan of Jackson's writing for many years but I think she deserves a better biographer. It's

actually quite hard to put my finger on what's wrong with this - all the necessary components are there but I just didn't believe the author really got Shirley Jackson.

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LibraryThing member froxgirl

One of the best biographies ever, about a writer of massive talent who died without even being near the peak of her powers. The author is achingly familiar with Jackson's handicaps and hardships - horribly judgmental parents to which she was tied tightly, emotionally and financially; husband

Stanley Hyman, the acclaimed academic, critic, and hound; constant financial struggles; agoraphobia. None of those prevented her from writing her chilling masterpieces - The Haunting of Hill House, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, and of course, the forever famous short story The Lottery. But Jackson was also a chronicler of family life with four children and a husband who could also be counted in their number - Demon in the House and Life Among the Savages. Her short stories, published in every major magazine of the 1950s - 1960s, including The New Yorker, were eagerly devoured by many fans who still couldn't quite get how she could write beautifully of both the macabre and the mundane. Access to Jackson's plentiful correspondence and the author's obvious sympathy and admiration give the reader an unforgettable opportunity to really KNOW a fascinating stranger.

Quotes: "I would not drop dead from the lack of you/my cat has more brains than the pack of you."

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LibraryThing member LyndaInOregon

This detailed biography of the author of “The Lottery”, “The Haunting of Hill House”, and other classics of horror and suspense reveals a woman who struggled throughout her life to gain the approval of those she loved, and to function within the strictures imposed on American women in the

mid 20th century.

Franklin paints with a broad brush here, covering American society, the world of academia, the publishing business, and the first stirrings of the feminist movement, returning frequently to Jackson’s fiction as reflective of all those influences. Jackson’s heroines, almost always cut off from society or repressed by their own insecurities, struggle to break free to genuine lives, and presage in many ways the concepts introduced by Betty Friedan in “The Feminine Mystique”.

Jackson herself was torn between wanting to write and gaining the approval of a difficult and demanding husband, and providing the support and love to her children that she had always sought, but never received, from her own mother. Her life was almost emblematic of the struggles Friedan discussed in her writings.

An ungainly young woman, Jackson never approached the ideals of beauty her own mother held dear. As she matured, she paid less and less attention to her appearance – a failing her mother never learned to accept. Instead, she turned her energies and her imagination to the characters and situations she created, peeling back facades to reveal the evil and darkness lurking beneath the surface. Her characters are frequently mad, or clinging to sanity by the merest thread. Yet, surprisingly, two of her best selling books chronicled her family life. “Life Among the Savages” and “Raising Demons” were light-hearted looks at rearing children, predating Jean Kerr’s “Please Don’t Eat the Daisies” and Erma Bombeck’s many domestic comedies by several years.

Casual fans familiar only with Jackson’s best-known works will discover the breadth of her collected works; scholars may learn much about the enigmatic and troubled author.

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LibraryThing member arosoff

My first encounter with Shirley Jackson was in the fourth grade, when we read "Charles," and it made an impression I did not forget. It was a few years later that I discovered her fiction, and I've been a fan ever since. I've been waiting for this book since I read the excerpts in the New Yorker.

It is the best kind of literary biography--an analysis of her life, her complicated marriage to Stanley Hyman (an accomplished writer and critic in his own right), and her work. Whether in a lighthearted domestic memoir or an apparent horror tale, Jackson focused on the lives of women--their relationships, their ties to domesticity, their place in their communities.

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LibraryThing member JBD1

A thorough and very readable biography of Shirley Jackson, which made me want to go out and read more of her stories, for sure.

LibraryThing member NanetteLS

A fascinating and well-researched study of a complicated and compelling author. I haven't read Jackson's work in decades but this inspired me to dive deeper into it. Her fascination with the occult, tarot, witchcraft permeates her work. Her difficult relationship with her mother is heartbreaking.

And her relationship with her unfaithful husband really colors her work. Definitely recommend the audio book and also a further exploration of her books and stories.

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