In 1949, a young writer named Shirley Jackson published a short story that would change the landscape of American literature. “The Lottery” was an instant sensation; some loved it, some hated it, and many were admittedly confused. Drawing on classic gothic and horror tales, and at the same time anticipating future themes in dystopian and postmodern literature, “The Lottery” remains the work most often associated with Jackson, though she was also a successful and influential novelist. Jackson herself was just as interesting and enigmatic as the complicated and fantastic tales she crafted. In SHIRLEY JACKSON: A Rather Haunted Life, biographer Ruth Franklin examines Jackson’s work and her personal life.

Shirley Jackson was born to an established San Francisco family that had made a name for itself by designing the houses of the city’s wealthiest citizens. Whether intentionally connected to the accomplishments of her great-great-grandfather and the family business or not, houses are featured strongly in her fiction; they serve, in her stories, as both sanctuaries and, more commonly, dangerous traps. The house motif was just one that Jackson visited again and again as she wrote stories of vulnerability in the face of horrors real and imagined, supernatural and mundane.

"...a richly detailed, fascinating, often heartbreaking look at Shirley Jackson’s important contribution to American literature and a fitting tribute to an incredibly compelling and sometimes troubled genius."

Jackson was a loving and creative mother to her four children, a devoted wife, a well-liked hostess and a respected lecturer. Yet, having grown up with a critical and distant mother, and married to a charming, brilliant and notoriously unfaithful scholar, Jackson lacked the confidence and support needed for a wholly content life, despite her successes, both popular and critical. She was a heavy drinker and smoker, was prescribed a variety of pills for everything from weight loss to anxiety, suffered from agoraphobia and colitis, and tragically died at the very early age of 48.

As she cultivated her craft, Jackson also cultivated a persona. She let people know about her interest in witchcraft and magic, and a few tongue-in-cheek comments later, this aspect of her identity took on a public life of its own. Franklin does a superb job peeling back the many layers of Jackson’s identity, how it shaped her writing, and how she was in the world and at home. The darkness in Jackson’s life was not, as many would believe, related to spells and incantations, but instead to loneliness, frustration and isolation. As a daughter she was often a disappointment to her mother, as a wife she was betrayed by her husband, and as a writer she was often misunderstood and even misjudged. She bucked the conventions of domesticity of the 1950s and ’60s; married to a Jew, she challenged the prejudices of her small-town New England neighbors. All these themes and motifs --- of difference and tension, bigotry and fear, gender and class --- are present in her six powerful novels and countless short stories.

Jackson was also known for her two bestselling memoirs capturing the controlled chaos of her unconventional family. The contrast between these more lighthearted and domestic books and her frightening and strange fiction was one that many critics and readers in her lifetime struggled to reconcile. And Jackson, too, seemed to wrestle with these contrasts, often with devastating results for her doomed protagonists. One of the strengths of Franklin’s biography is a critical glimpse into these two, not unrelated, facets of Jackson’s work and private life. That one woman could be so multi-dimensional, multi-talented, intellectually sophisticated, and diverse in her own view of the world is an idea that was new to many at the time.

A RATHER HAUNTED LIFE is a richly detailed, fascinating, often heartbreaking look at Shirley Jackson’s important contribution to American literature and a fitting tribute to an incredibly compelling and sometimes troubled genius. Vastly entertaining, well-organized and readable, this is a book that does justice to one of our most important and talented modern writers.