Shirley Jackson: everything you need to know about the American horror writer

As Shirley, the trippy, twisty and not quite truthful biopic of the brilliant author is released with Elisabeth Moss in the starring role, here’s our guide to America’s queen of gothic
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Descriptions of Shirley Jackson’s work are often rather barbed. “Miss Jackson writes not with a pen, but with a broomstick,” sniped the Associated Press, while critics called her “Virginia Werewolf”. But Jackson, who died in 1965, had the last laugh. She became one of the most successful American gothic writers of the 20th century, writing what the New Yorker described as its most controversial story, The Lottery (1948), which is still taught in American high schools. It’s particularly notable given how few female American authors from that time are still widely read. Now Jackson's life has been loosely dramatised in new biopic Shirley, starring Elisabeth Moss as the titular writer, and her ghost story The Haunting of Hill House is a popular Netflix series. Admirers of her domestic noir stories and novels,  which are characterised by an ominous creeping sense of dread, include the authors Donna Tartt, Neil Gaiman and Joyce Carol Oates. So who was this extraordinary woman, who also turned out breezy articles for Good Housekeeping about being a mother and housewife, and what is her legacy?

The woman

Jackson was born on 14 December, 1916, in an affluent part of San Francisco. Her father’s family were successful architects; her mother came from the English aristocracy and her maternal grandmother was a Christian Science faith healer. Jackson wrote about her fractious relationship with her mother, Geraldine, who preferred her younger brother and told Jackson she was the product of a failed abortion. She also lamented her daughter’s disappointing appearance, remarking: “I have been so sad all morning about what you have allowed yourself to look like.”

This relationship informed Jackson’s work – her novels are full of lonely, misunderstood young women, like Merricat Blackwood, the protagonist of We Have Always Lived in the Castle – and a common theme in her stories, as she described it, is that “the whole world is cruel and afraid of people who are different”. Even once Jackson was a successful novelist her mother wasn’t pleased, calling her books “repetitious”.

At Syracuse University, where she studied journalism, Jackson met her future husband, critic Stanley Edgar Hyman. He read Jackson’s short story, Janice, about a teenager trying to commit suicide, in a college magazine and was intrigued. They had four children but the marriage was unhappy – Hyman wanted an open relationship and bragged about his sex life to his wife. He was jealous of her success and felt emasculated by it, but enjoyed the money it brought in.

Jackson, perhaps inevitably, struggled with her mental health and eventually developed agoraphobia. She put on weight, chain smoked and in 1965 she died suddenly of complications related to a heart condition, aged 48. Her eldest son, Laurence Jackson Hyman, who looks after her archive, remembers her as kinder than the woman she said she was. He says she managed to make the fact that she wrote while also doing all the shopping and cooking seem great fun, always telling clever jokes.

The stories

Despite the shopping, cooking and childcare, Jackson was prolific – she wrote six novels, two memoirs and more than 200 short stories. The Lottery is a good gateway into her work. Like many of Jackson’s stories it deftly combines social satire with the paranormal. It is set in a small village (similar to North Bennington, Vermont, where Jackson moved after she married) and is about a tight-knit community which blindly follows a tradition each year without realising how cruel it is and how it eclipses individual identities. Jackson saw the story as her revenge on her neighbours, portraying them in the story as barbaric.

As Jackson went on with her writing, she moved from exploring whether communities were what stifled her female characters to more psychological stories in which their minds house the real horror. The Haunting of Hill House (1959) at first seems like a straightforward ghost story set up – a group goes to a grand old house to discover its past – but as it progresses, we wonder if Eleanor, who has experienced strange visions since she was a girl, is actually haunted. Is she so unhappy that her mind has created a poltergeist? What’s most terrifying is that if the horror is in her own mind, she cannot run away from it.

In We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962) Jackson returned to close-knit communities and family trouble, following Mary Katherine, known as Merricat, an 18 year old who lives with her sister and uncle in Vermont, isolated from the rest of the village by hearsay and hatred.

Elisabeth Moss as Shirley Jackson in Shirley
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The style

Jackson writes with great economy – she is sparing with adjectives and adverbs but somehow manages to create an ominous sense that a terrible event is about to happen. At the same time she is funny – Elisabeth Moss in Shirley shows this side of her, with her making sharp digs at her husband and joking that she has called her novella “None of your goddamn business.” When Jackson died she was working on a more upbeat novel about a widow starting a new life in a boarding house, alone but “confident in her own fine high gleefulness”. The last words she wrote in her journal chimed with this mood: “I am the captain of my fate. Laughter is possible.”

The feminism

At a time where women were expected to just get on with being housewives and not complain about their own needs, Jackson bucked the trend and spoke up. She is seen as a proto-feminist, who wrote about creative women stifled by selfish, rude men. In Dark Tales (1948), she writes: “An odd thought crossed her mind: she would pick up the heavy glass ashtray and smash her husband over the head with it.” You can't help wondering how often that thought had crossed the mind of the writer.  Jackson drew cartoons too, including one of herself struggling to carry bags of groceries up a hill with her husband sitting reading in an armchair in the background telling her not to carry heavy things while pregnant.

Jackson’s biographer Ruth Franklin sees Merricat and her sister Constance in We Have Always Lived in the Castle as two sides of the same woman and an early version of Betty Friedan’s split identity 1950s housewife – a person in her own right and also her husband’s image of a woman. But Jackson rarely gives her female characters happy endings. The Lottery and The Adventures of James Harris (1949) feature men who the women think are going to heroically save the day, but it comes to nothing.

The legacy

The way Jackson explores women’s struggles through horror has earned her comparisons to Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who wrote The Yellow Wallpaper, and Jane Eyre’s character Bertha Mason, Mr Rochester’s violently disturbed wife whom he keeps in the attic. More recently, Ottesa Moshfegh’s Death in Her Hands has a Jacksonish feel.

Jackson Hyman has worked hard to get all his mother's books back into print, and feels her work seems relevant again in the Trump era. He found watching Shirley, which he described as exaggerated and plays fairly fast and loose with biography, difficult, but he has met Moss and approves of her performance. He saw first hand what his mother faced – for example, when she went into hospital to have his sister, Jackson was asked her occupation. She said writer and the man checking her in said, “well I’ll just put down housewife”. Where did I put that ashtray?