"You once wrote me a letter . . . telling me that I would never be lonely again. I think that was the first, the most dreadful lie you ever told me."Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life and are, by some measures, the beating heart of the book. They are taken from an undated letter Jackson wrote to her husband, literary critic Stanley Edgar Hyman. But Franklin employs them not so much for what they reveal about Jackson's frequently unhappy marriage but instead to tease out the many murky nuances of what "lonely" meant for Jackson — as a writer whose work frequently defied categorization, as a woman chafing against her era's notions of what a woman could be, and as an artist of singular talent in a time and place when singularity was often suspect.New York Times review of We Have Always Lived in the Castle . "There is magic in her books, and baffling magic some of it is, too." Indeed, since Jackson first began publishing stories in the early 1940s, there have been critics, editors, and befuddled readers who simply did not know what to do with her. From her psychologically twisty novels to her madcap family memoirs and her wildly diverse stories, which range from Puritan Gothic to family sketches to deft studies in social mores, Jackson's work both defies simple categorization and exposes the limits of such categories, of genre itself.Good Housekeeping, McCall's, and Woman's Day, even criticizing her for squandering her writing time on letters to relatives or friends. As a result, Jackson spent most of her adult life fitting writing into every spare corner of time while she ran a busy household, maintained her role as faculty wife, and managed her publishing career. Hyman, meanwhile, took years to complete his considerably less lucrative books of literary criticism. The pressures, compounded by her sense of being the "eccentric" in Bennington and the other New England towns in which they landed, weighed heavily on Jackson.Life Among the Savages (1953) and Raising Demons (1957) — books that were authentic reflections but also shaped by an author very aware of the marketplace. New York Times obituary refers to her as a "neat and cozy woman" and features the reassuring subheading "Housework Came First." Jackson couldn't escape strictures from the opposite side of the ideological aisle, either: Franklin reports Betty Friedan's critique of Jackson as one of those "new breed of women writers" who reject their craft in favor of cloying, propagandist accounts of domestic pleasure. Friedan's narrow point of view didn't allow for Jackson's unique, incendiary power. As Franklin ably argues, Jackson's family memoirs contain "genuinely subversive" elements, such as showing both a mother's faux-murderous frustration in much of her responsibilities and her unabashed pleasure in escaping them, whether into a "weekend away or . . . two martinis to get through the dinner hour." Touchingly, Franklin quotes a condolence letter from a "housewife on Long Island" to Hyman after Jackson's death, noting, "She was one of us, and greater and smarter, and funnier than any of us. It was good to know she was there."We Have Always Lived in the Castle and The Haunting of Hill House — have ensured her legacy, most readers today, if they know Jackson, know her from her unforgettable (and endlessly anthologized) short story, "The Lottery." Its publication in The New Yorker in 1948 changed Jackson's life forever. Franklin shows how — her privacy invaded, her personal life parsed, her mailbox flooded by frequently angry or accusatory letters from readers across the globe — Jackson came to rue the story's success even as she knew it made her name. By approaching the well-worn story and its impact on Jackson from every angle — literary, cultural, and personal — Franklin breathes new life into it, and it is in such close parsing of the texts themselves that A Rather Haunted Life truly dazzles. Time magazine profile. Jackson's initial, unsent reply demands her mother cease her "unending" critiques. Franklin finds a canny parallel when, early in their relationship, Jackson wrote Hyman an angry, broken letter after he confided an infidelity. Once more, she never sent it, never let her pain reach its source. Both mother and husband provoke her rage and break her heart, yet Jackson stifles herself — not on the page, but the pages never reach their intended recipient. Her fiction, however, is where those feelings find their home.The Bird's Nest, Hangsaman, The Haunting of Hill House ), or a family standing apart and isolate from the larger community or world (We Have Always Lived in the Castle, The Sundial ). In the last few years of her short life, the spotlight more intense, her marriage foundering, children leaving the household one by one, Jackson's loneliness and anxiety seemed to overwhelm her. But she mined these emotions always and found an immense readership by doing so. "Insecure, uncontrolled, i [sic] wrote of neuroses and fear," she wrote in her diary, "and i think all my books laid end to end would be one long documentation of anxiety." That is a statement that, however specific to Jackson's psyche, denotes something larger and more resonant: how a writer's anxiety, pain, and anger can take darkly luminous shape, ready to be shared with readers in a way that we don't comprehend so much as experience as revelation. Jackson's imagination transmits to us the hauntedness of love and of family and the essential loneliness that stories (and perhaps stories alone) have the power to efface.
Reviewer: Megan Abbott
The Barnes & Noble Review
…with this welcome new biography Franklin makes a thoughtful and persuasive case for Jackson as a serious and accomplished literary artist—not a major one, perhaps, but one worthy of renewed attention…The value of Franklin's book…is its thoroughness and the way she traces Jackson's evolution as an artist, sensibly pointing out what's autobiographical and what isn't. She sees Jackson not as an oddball, one-off writer of horror tales and ghost stories but as someone belonging to the great tradition of Hawthorne, Poe and James, writers preoccupied, as she was, with inner evil in the human soul.
The New York Times Book Review - Charles McGrath
05/23/2016
"[Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life ] represents the latest and most concerted attempt to reclaim the writer’s reputation. It’s also a fresh effort to frame her as an artist with extraordinary insight into the lives, the concerns, and—above all—the fears of women…Gender is not the only prejudice that has kept us from acknowledging the brilliance of Shirley Jackson, but Franklin’s biography is a giant step toward the truth."
"Ruth Franklin’s sympathetic and masterful biography both uncovers Jackson’s secret and haunting life and repositions her as a major artist whose fiction so uncannily channeled women’s nightmares and contradictions that it is ‘nothing less than the secret history of American women of her era.’"
"Franklin’s biography takes us beyond the chilling stories that made Shirley Jackson’s name into the dilemmas of a woman writer in the 1950s and ’60s, struggling to make a career between the pressures of childcare, domesticity, and her own demons. It’s a very modern story, and a terrific read."
"Franklin's research is wide and deep, drawing on Jackson's published and unpublished writings including correspondence and diaries, as well as interviews….Franklin has shown the interplay between the life, the work, and the times with real skill and insight, making this fine book a real contribution not only to biography, but to mid-20th-century women's history."
Chicago Tribune - Katherine A. Powers
"[Shirley Jackson ] strongly affirms the American author’s powerful collection of stories, novels and memoirs. . . . Magisterial and compulsively readable."
Minneapolis Star Tribune - Lauren LeBlanc
"A biography that is both historically engaging and pressingly relevant, Ruth Franklin’s absorbing book not only feelingly creates a portrait of Shirley Jackson the writer but also provides a stirring sense of what it was like to navigate (and sometimes circumvent) the strictures of American society as a wife, mother, artist, and woman."
"Comprehensive…Jackson’s lifelong interest in rituals, witchcraft, charms and hexes were, Franklin convincingly maintains, metaphors for exploring power and disempowerment…Franklin situates Jackson’s conflicted relationship with coercive postwar US domesticity within the context that would give rise in 1963 to Betty Friedan’s attack on ‘the feminine mystique’…[A] sympathetic and fair-minded biography."
The Guardian - Sarah Churchwell
"A Shirley Jackson biography seems especially timely today, even though Jackson, as with many of her stories, remains somewhat mythically timeless….Franklin’s is both broader in scope and more measured in its analysis….[A] masterful account."
"With this welcome new biography Franklin makes a thoughtful and persuasive case for Jackson as a serious and accomplished literary artist. . . . [Franklin] sees Jackson not as an oddball, one-off writer of horror tales and ghost stories but as someone belonging to the great tradition of Hawthorne, Poe and James, writers preoccupied, as she was, with inner evil in the human soul."
"Ruth Franklin has written the ideal biography of a figure long and unjustly neglected in the history of twentieth-century American literature. By restoring Shirley Jackson to her proper stature as one of our great writers, Franklin has in a stroke revised the canon."
"Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life . . . lifts its subject out of the genre ghetto and makes a convincing case that Jackson was a courageous woman in a male-dominated field whose themes resonate strongly today."
Seattle Times - Jeff Baker
"This meticulous biography tackles the work of Shirley Jackson with the kind of studied seriousness some might give to a male titan of history like Robert Moses. And thank goddess for that, as Ruth Franklin wisely rescues Shirley Jackson from any semblance of obscurity. Despite her well-documented magnetism (and dalliances in the dark arts) Jackson's work was often dismissed as mere genre nonsense or, worse yet, women's fiction and Franklin's sensitive, witty and rigorous work makes an airtight case for just why this isn't right. The ire Jackson's short stories inspired in New Yorker readers is only a hint of the drama and intensity that characterized her short but beguiling life, with Franklin captures with a hefty dose of wit and suspense. One of the best literary biographies I've ever encountered."
"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. Ruth Franklin’s excellent Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life is all that and more…Franklin proves to be a supple biographer."
"A perfect marriage of biographer and subject: Ruth Franklin’s portrait of Shirley Jackson restores to her rightful place a writer of considerable significance, and draws a rich intellectual portrait of the age."
"With her account of an emblematically American literary life, Ruth Franklin reminds us that her subject was far more than the writer of classy ghost stories. On the contrary, Shirley Jackson was the harbinger of profound upheavals both societal and literary. This is a brilliant biography on every level, but it is especially astute on Jackson's ground- and genre-breaking work, which I will now reread immediately."
"Franklin is a conscientious, lucid biographer, and her book is never less than engaging."
Wall Street Journal - Blake Bailey
"Ruth Franklin is the biographer Jackson needed: she tells the story of the author in a way that made me want to reread every word Jackson ever wrote."
"Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life deftly narrates the influences, experiences and reputation of the author of the famously enduring story ‘The Lottery.’ As a history of the literary culture of the 1940s and ’50s, it teases out the daily lives of people who displayed James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses,’ Wilhelm Reich’s ‘The Function of the Orgasm’ and James George Frazer’s ‘The Golden Bough’ on their coffee tables. And as a chronicle of American life in the Eisenhower era, it reminds us of a time when people with too many books could be considered subversive…Much of Jackson’s writing is a weird, rich brew, and Franklin captures its savor."
San Francisco Chronicle - Seth Lerer
"Masterful…Taut, insightful, and thrilling, in ways that haunt, not quite as ghost story, but as a tale of a woman who strains against the binds of marriage, of domesticity, and suffers for it in a way that is of her time as a 1950s homemaker, and in a way that speaks to what it means to be a writer, an artist, and a woman even now."
Boston Globe - Nina MacLaughlin
"Comprehensive…Jackson’s lifelong interest in rituals, witchcraft, charms and hexes were, Franklin convincingly maintains, metaphors for exploring power and disempowerment…Franklin situates Jackson’s conflicted relationship with coercive postwar US domesticity within the context that would give rise in 1963 to Betty Friedan’s attack on ‘the feminine mystique’…[A] sympathetic and fair-minded biography."
Sarah Churchwell - The Guardian
"Masterful…Taut, insightful, and thrilling, in ways that haunt, not quite as ghost story, but as a tale of a woman who strains against the binds of marriage, of domesticity, and suffers for it in a way that is of her time as a 1950s homemaker, and in a way that speaks to what it means to be a writer, an artist, and a woman even now."
Nina MacLaughlin - Boston Globe
"Franklin is a conscientious, lucid biographer, and her book is never less than engaging."
Blake Bailey - Wall Street Journal
"Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life . . . lifts its subject out of the genre ghetto and makes a convincing case that Jackson was a courageous woman in a male-dominated field whose themes resonate strongly today."
Jeff Baker - Seattle Times
"[Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life ] represents the latest and most concerted attempt to reclaim the writer’s reputation. It’s also a fresh effort to frame her as an artist with extraordinary insight into the lives, the concerns, and—above all—the fears of women…Gender is not the only prejudice that has kept us from acknowledging the brilliance of Shirley Jackson, but Franklin’s biography is a giant step toward the truth."
"Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life deftly narrates the influences, experiences and reputation of the author of the famously enduring story ‘The Lottery.’ As a history of the literary culture of the 1940s and ’50s, it teases out the daily lives of people who displayed James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses,’ Wilhelm Reich’s ‘The Function of the Orgasm’ and James George Frazer’s ‘The Golden Bough’ on their coffee tables. And as a chronicle of American life in the Eisenhower era, it reminds us of a time when people with too many books could be considered subversive…Much of Jackson’s writing is a weird, rich brew, and Franklin captures its savor."
Seth Lerer - San Francisco Chronicle
"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. Ruth Franklin’s excellent Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life is all that and more…Franklin proves to be a supple biographer."
"[Shirley Jackson ] strongly affirms the American author’s powerful collection of stories, novels and memoirs…Magisterial and compulsively readable."
Lauren LeBlanc - Minneapolis Star Tribune
"A Shirley Jackson biography seems especially timely today, even though Jackson, as with many of her stories, remains somewhat mythically timeless….Franklin’s is both broader in scope and more measured in its analysis….[A] masterful account."
"Franklin's research is wide and deep, drawing on Jackson's published and unpublished writings including correspondence and diaries, as well as interviews….Franklin has shown the interplay between the life, the work, and the times with real skill and insight, making this fine book a real contribution not only to biography, but to mid-20th-century women's history."
Katherine A. Powers - Chicago Tribune
"With this welcome new biography Franklin makes a thoughtful and persuasive case for Jackson as a serious and accomplished literary artist. . . . [Franklin] sees Jackson not as an oddball, one-off writer of horror tales and ghost stories but as someone belonging to the great tradition of Hawthorne, Poe and James, writers preoccupied, as she was, with inner evil in the human soul."
Charles McGrath - New York Times Book Review
"Ruth Franklin’s sympathetic and masterful biography both uncovers Jackson’s secret and haunting life and repositions her as a major artist whose fiction so uncannily channeled women’s nightmares and contradictions that it is ‘nothing less than the secret history of American women of her era.’"
Elaine Showalter - Washington Post
★ 08/01/2016
This audiobook is proof positive that Jackson’s best-known story, “The Lottery,” is just the tip of the iceberg with regard to her talent. Placing her in the American gothic tradition, alongside Hawthorne and Poe, is high praise indeed. Narrator Bernadette Dunne has just the voice to capture the biography’s tenor and subject, and she does a marvelous job creating an interesting audio experience. Dunne’s voice is deep, slightly raspy, and serious enough to support the author’s view that Jackson is an important literary voice that deserves to be heard. She also keeps the audiobook moving, using her range and excellent pacing to maintain our interest throughout this essential critical appraisal. Dunne stays away from character voices, relying on her measured tone and clear diction. R.I.G. © AudioFile 2016, Portland, Maine
DECEMBER 2016 - AudioFile
★ 2016-05-25
