shirley jackson a rather haunted life by ruth franklin

That Jackson struggled with this dilemma is certainly true, and the chaotic life that resulted is the subject of much of her nonfiction. “Her body of work constitutes nothing less than the secret history of American women of her era,” Franklin writes, placing at the center of Jackson’s life the ever-pressing conflict between being an artist and being a wife and mother. Jackson’s posthumous reputation is hardly much better: She is mostly known these days for a single, overanthologized short story, “The Lottery.” A few years ago, when the Library of America brought out a collection of her stories and novels, the Newsweek critic Malcolm Jones accused the Library of stooping so low it was about to “jump the shark.” But Jackson has always had a coterie of admirers, including Stephen King, Jonathan Lethem, Joyce Carol Oates, the critics Laura Miller and Ruth Franklin, and 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. A few of the Bennington students knew who she was, but to most she was just another faculty wife, and a fat and creepy one at that, someone who drank too much and whose house stank of cat pee.

To her chagrin, she was far better known (and better compensated) for the women’s-magazine essays she wrote about housekeeping and child-rearing - today they seem like high-end Erma Bombeck - than for her quirky, hard-to-categorize novels like “The Haunting of Hill House” and “We Have Always Lived in the Castle.” Even in her marriage, it was her husband, Stanley Edgar Hyman, a literary critic and popular teacher at Bennington College, who hogged all the attention, though it was mostly her earnings that paid for their lifestyle of nonstop boozing and extravagant book-buying and gift-giving. The clerk said, “I’ll just put down housewife.” All her life, Jackson struggled to be taken seriously as a writer. Shirley Jackson once wrote that when she went to the hospital to deliver the third of her four children, the admitting clerk asked for her occupation. SHIRLEY JACKSON A Rather Haunted Life By Ruth Franklin Illustrated.

Shirley jackson a rather haunted life by ruth franklin