Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life [Paperback]

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 Franklins sympathetic and masterful biography both uncovers Jacksons secret and haunting life and repositions her as a major artist whose fiction so uncannily channeled womens nightmares and contradictions that it is nothing less than the secret history of American women of her era.Franklin is a conscientious, lucid biographer, and her book is never less than engaging.Franklin's research is wide and deep, drawing on Jackson's published and unpublished writings including correspondence and diaries, as well as interviews&.Franklin has shown the interplay between the life, the work, and the times with real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.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.A Shirley Jackson biography seems especially timely today, even though Jackson, as with many of her stories, remains somewhat mythically timeless&.Franklins is both broader in scope and more measured in its analysis&.[A] masterful account.Comprehensive&Jacksons lifelong interest in rituals, witchcraft, charms and hexes were, Franklin convincingly maintains, metaphors for exploring power and disempowerment&Franklin situates Jacksons conflicted relationship with coercive postwar US domesticity within the context that woull3œ