A Beginner’s Guide to Shirley Jackson
The first in an ongoing series about Shirley Jackson, this writer's favorite writer, an icon of the short horror story—and so much more.
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What do you think of when you hear the name Shirley Jackson? Shirley Jackson, the morbid writer of semi-dystopian short stories like “The Lottery?” (Most likely.) Shirley Jackson, the novelist behind eerie, unsettling books about ghostly young women like The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle? (Definitely possible.) Shirley Jackson, proto-feminist mother of four who brilliantly captured the ennui of the post-WWII housewife? (Less likely.)
There is no one answer. Jackson was all of these, and all within the confines of a relatively short career. The author shot to literary fame in her early 30s when The New Yorker published “The Lottery” in 1948, and remained prolific until her death in 1965. In the interim, she’d write six novels, two memoirs, and over 200 short stories. She’d become the breadwinner of her family with humorous slice-of-life stories about stay-at-home mothers. She’d build a prolific body of work exploring domesticity, dystopia, mental illness, cruelty, gender, class, and—of course—haunting. She’d merit the title of literary icon, mastering a creeping dread in her prose that few have been able to mimic, much less surpass, in the nearly 60 years since her death. But she’d also—at least for a while—find herself brushed aside in literary history, her wider body of work largely ignored by critics who dismissed the ghostly, Gothic, ghoulish writings of a chronically ill housewife and self-proclaimed witch. Then, thanks to later feminist critics, a sudden influx of film and TV adaptations, and perhaps a general desire among readers for an author who saw the horrific, mundane absurdity in the American project, she’d be reborn, synonymous with not just “The Lottery,” but with reinventing the American Gothic.
This guide will be the first in a series of pieces I plan to write about Jackson’s work, from her iconic short stories to her hypnotic novels, to her less-discussed memoirs and home life. Because the author was so prolific—and is consequently so hard to pin down in one literary tradition—I thought it would make sense to start with an overview of Jackson’s work, combining all of the many puzzle pieces that would cement her legendary status. Starting with “The Lottery” (what else?), we’ll break down the key points of Jackson’s career, including a recommended reading order for her six novels, a few favorite short stories, and a roadmap for exploring her memoirs. Be sure to check the very bottom of this post for some bonus material to guide your reading journey!
Table of Contents
Read First:
The Lottery and Other Stories, 75th Anniversary Edition, (2023)
Long before she was a revered—if still underrated—novelist, Jackson hit literary fame with her short horror stories. Chief among them was “The Lottery,” Jackson’s classic about a fictional small town’s mysterious annual tradition. If you were educated in the United States, there’s a high chance “The Lottery” was your introduction to Jackson long before Mike Flanagan (loosely) adapted The Haunting of Hill House for television.1 In this collection, originally compiled in 1948 and republished last year with a new introduction, “The Lottery” appears alongside 24 additional short stories, all written before Jackson made her name as a novelist.
Jackson’s short stories, for better or for worse, are often strikingly unlike her novels. Though the author was never one to go beyond flirting with the supernatural, her signature slow-burn, creeping horror often takes a backseat to blunt, casual cruelty in her short-form work. Neighbors kill each other with rocks, or else send each other anonymous threats, or steal each other’s homes altogether. Spouse turns against spouse in an elaborate conspiracy. Children run away from home, never to return. The stories feel almost like a drawing board for her more restricted output as a novelist; they were the grounds on which she explored what it meant to pull horror from the domestic. Where novels like Hangsaman, The Bird’s Nest, The Haunting of Hill House, and We Have Always Lived in the Castle see Jackson zero in on constructing a protagonist, fleshing out her equivalent of the Final Girl, her short stories are instead a years-long project of experimenting with theme, sharpening her immaculate prose all the while. In short, it doesn’t have to be The Lottery, but no exploration of Jackson would be complete without a pitstop at her short stories.
Author’s note: As an alternate (and arguably even stronger) choice, look for Dark Tales, Penguin’s 2016 collection of 16 Jackson stories, which—while it doesn’t include “The Lottery”—does include my personal favorite, “A Visit,” as well as the recently-rediscovered story “Paranoia” and a foreword by Ottessa Moshfegh.
Read Next: The Novels
First: We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962)
In We Have Always Lived in the Castle, the Blackwood sisters—18-year-old misanthrope Mary Katherine “Merricat” and 28-year-old, kindhearted but severely agoraphobic Constance—live in isolation in their dilapidated family mansion, with only the frail Uncle Julian to keep them company. Outside the bounds of their estate, the townspeople once employed by the wealthy Blackwood family now revile the sisters, believing Constance responsible for murdering the rest of the family six years earlier. While Constance lives in relative delusion about the murder, Merricat protects her older sister with practiced spells and a hard exterior. Then Charles, the Blackwoods’ charismatic but self-absorbed cousin, arrives unannounced for a prolonged visit, and Merricat realizes the biggest threat to her delicate existence may be closer than she thinks.
As a novelist, Jackson is arguably best known for two signatures: her isolated, slowly unraveling young woman protagonists and her architectural tendencies—novels in which a vast, looming Gothic mansion is not just a backdrop, but almost a character itself. We Have Always Lived in the Castle has both in spades.2 Much like the titular house in The Haunting of Hill House and the Halloran house of The Sundial, the Blackwood family home dominates We Have Always Lived in the Castle, looming over not just the surviving Blackwoods, but the entire village that surrounds them. It’s a paragon Jackson House—in a novel where the horror is part supernatural, part social, and all viscerally real, the structure itself becomes a manifestation of everything that happens inside of it.
This novel is widely considered Jackson’s magnum opus, a title given largely thanks to Merricat, its arresting, unreliable narrator, long considered one of Jackson’s best. (Jackson also swaps out the free indirect discourse of earlier novels like Hangsaman and The Haunting of Hill House for a first-person stream of consciousness that somehow makes Merricat an even more enigmatic narrator than her predecessors.) But We Have Always Lived in the Castle also sees Jackson at her most refined: an unparalleled narrator against the uncanny, not-quite-supernatural horror that made her famous, and the mastery of setting that made her a Gothic icon. For that reason, magnum opus or not, it’s probably the strongest point of entry to her work.
The Haunting of Hill House (1959)
In The Haunting of Hill House, Eleanor Vance is a lonely young woman who has spent most of her life caring for an ailing mother when she spontaneously agrees to partake in a study of the supernatural. Alongside paranormal investigator Dr. Montague, free-spirited artist Theodora, and wealthy heir Luke, Eleanor moves into the mysterious Hill House, an isolated mansion where caretakers refuse to stay after dark and past owners have met gruesome fates. When the four inhabitants start to experience unexplained phenomena, Eleanor wonders whether her visions are simply the product of an overactive imagination, or something more sinister…
In her foreword to Dark Tales, Ottessa Moshfegh wrote, “Though Jackson often starts off rather benignly—her characters are never panicked from the get-go, but snake their way into states of dismay—she has a mystifying knack for illustrating the horrifying uncertainties around the basic laws of reality.” That’s perhaps where Jackson’s short stories meet her novels: though her books typically make use of the extra space to flesh out her characters over their plots, it’s that creeping horror, the slow corrosion of the bounds between real, imagined, and supernatural, that weaves the strongest thread throughout her prose.
This is all especially true of The Haunting of Hill House. For all the praise (deservedly) heaped on We Have Always Lived in the Castle, there is something absolutely breathtaking about the ghosts of Hill House, from the first suggestion of their existence to their climax in what may be Jackson’s best final scene. For Jackson, Hill House is a masterful balancing act; every puzzle piece and repressed memory that makes up Eleanor Vance—like every slat of wood in the mansion’s walls—is described in impeccable detail without ever giving away too much of the truth behind the haunting. Even for an author known for mastering the ghost story, The Haunting of Hill House is a tour de force.
That’s also what makes it work so well as an early point of entry to Jackson’s body of work. If the author had any crowd-pleasers, that title certainly goes to We Have Always Lived in the Castle, but Hill House lives at the apex of the many signatures Jackson had so carefully cultivated over her career. Eleanor Vance, in all her loneliness, regret, and haunting, is a protagonist Jackson could only have achieved after toiling away on earlier characters like Hangsaman’s Natalie Waite and The Bird’s Nest’s Elizabeth Richmond. Hill House, looming, fearful, and enigmatic, is built on the bones of earlier efforts like The Sundial’s Halloran house and the Montague House in “A Visit.” The novel’s perfectly towed line of toying with the supernatural was narrowed and refined carefully in the text of numerous novels and countless short stories long before Hill House went to print. In that sense, Hill House may be Jackson’s true magnum opus, the culmination of everything she’d built—but it’s also the key to unlocking the rest of her work.
Hangsaman (1951)
In Hangsaman, 17-year-old Natalie Waite is a prodigious but sheltered writer, living entirely under the thumb of her pompous literary critic father. Then she begins her first year at a remote women’s college, where—attempting to repress the memory of a recent trauma and having failed to, in her words, “form a workable personality to take along”—she finds herself with a loosening grip on who exactly “Natalie Waite” might be.
Despite the fame of the previous two novels, Hangsaman, to me, has always been at least an equal masterpiece. That said, it may be a masterpiece best appreciated if you have some familiarity with Jackson’s work. Though Hangsaman was written nearly a decade earlier, I think The Haunting of Hill House provides a necessary foundation for getting the most out of this novel, which similarly explores trauma and isolation through a quasi-supernatural lens. However, Hangsaman, which features the youngest of Jackson’s protagonists, toys with other genres beyond just horror—there are elements of mystery and the bildungsroman, and even an argument to be made that Hangsaman is an early example of the campus novel. It is, as Jackson’s best tended to be, a novel about haunting, but equally so one about obsession, and about losing one’s old self and finding a new one. It’s also ostensibly the most optimistic novel Jackson wrote in her lifetime.
Hangsaman was loosely inspired by the real-life 1946 disappearance of Paula Jean Welden, a sophomore at Bennington College—where Jackson’s husband, literary critic Stanley Edgar Hyman, worked as an English professor.3 But it veers away from the true crime novel, planting itself more firmly in the realm of the Gothic or even speculative fiction. Jackson’s best work makes you question not just what constitutes reality in the world of the story, but what makes a haunting in the first place. Hangsaman does that and so much more.
The Bird’s Nest (1954)
Like Eleanor Vance after her, Elizabeth Richmond of The Bird’s Nest is experiencing a haunting that those around her are all too quick to write off as delusion. She finds ominous notes written to her from no one in particular, she can’t seem to find an explanation for her chronic body aches, and though she has no memory of it, her Aunt Morgen keeps accusing her of sneaking out at night. As she attempts to uncover the haunting, Elizabeth is constantly interrupted by three other women, Betsy, Beth, and Bess—all of whom, as it turns out, are actually the same woman, Elizabeth, suffering from Dissociative Identity Disorder. Under the watchful eye of Aunt Morgen and her psychiatrist, Dr. Wright, Elizabeth struggles to maintain control as the more impulsive Betsy and colder Bess take hold. In the process, all four women come closer to uncovering the buried trauma that triggered their condition.
Written as Jackson herself struggled with chronic illness and pain, The Bird’s Nest is visceral and stomach-churning, at home in its tragedy. Though it was far from the author’s biggest success in her lifetime, critics have started to revisit The Bird’s Nest in recent years, arguing its status as foundational in the canon of mental illness in women’s literature, a novel that defined conventions long before the arrival of The Bell Jar nine years later. But for our purposes, it’s equally worth revisiting as a key point in Jackson’s literary timeline: the development period between the eerie isolation of Hangsaman and the full-blown haunting of Hill House.
Alongside Hangsaman and Hill House, The Bird’s Nest makes this era of Jackson’s writing feel almost like a trilogy, with each isolated, haunted young woman building to a climax in Eleanor Vance. If every previous Jackson novel gave a piece of itself to Hill House (which I believe it did), then inside Eleanor are unmistakable traces of the desperation and unresolved trauma we see in The Bird’s Nest’s Elizabeth Richmond. Jackson’s literary style—from early-career short stories like “A Visit” to We Have Always Lived in the Castle at the end of her life—is made distinct by the author’s prowess for unreliable narrators, and The Bird’s Nest feels like peeking inside the incubation process of her genius.
The Road Through The Wall (1948)
In The Road Through the Wall, the residents of Pepper Street—an affluent area sequestered from surrounding lower-class neighborhoods by a massive brick wall—espouse their civility even as their deeply rooted, violent biases seep down into their children. When the residents learn that the wall will soon be destroyed to make way for a lower-income housing development, their bigotry makes itself known as they give in to fear over what their new neighbors might bring. Then a gruesome, unexplained tragedy strikes the neighborhood, and Pepper Street’s so-called civility is brought into question.
Reflecting on the novel after its publication, Jackson once wrote, “The first book is the book you have to write to get back at your parents… Once you get that out of your way, you can start writing books.” Set in an affluent California suburb loosely based on the real suburb where Jackson grew up, The Road Through the Wall proves her point.
The Road Through the Wall was Jackson’s debut as a novelist, published the same year as “The Lottery” and before she had quite refined her niche in the Gothic canon. It’s not quite as eerie and haunting as later novels like Hill House or even Hangsaman, and unlike most of her later work, doesn’t play with the supernatural. Instead, The Road Through the Wall reads more like something by Jackson’s contemporary, Flannery O’Connor—sharp in its observations and cultural criticism, unyieldingly bleak in its horror. That might make it a tougher read—to be fair, it’s certainly where Jackson feels at her least Shirley Jackson, in the horror sense. At the same time, it gets at what shot her to fame as a short-story writer, with the casual cruelty and shocking twists of “The Lottery,” and an enigmatic, at times almost frustrating structure that leaves as many questions as it does answers. Thematically, it’s somewhere between her later novels, in all their full-blown horror, and her memoirs, in which she reflects on her upbringing, suburban life, and her relationship with motherhood. With that in mind, sticking with this one feels like getting to know Jackson, in all her thematic complexity, that much better.
Last: The Sundial (1958)
In The Sundial, various members of the old-money Halloran family come together for the funeral of Lionel, the heir to the coveted Halloran estate, who died unexpectedly in what his wife believes must have been a murder by his jealous mother, Orianna. Indeed, Orianna Halloran is more than happy to reclaim her title as lady of the house, dismissing all but a skeleton crew of the various family members and staff members who inhabit it. That is, until Fanny Halloran, Orianna’s superstitious sister-in-law, receives a vision: the apocalypse is coming, and only those inside the Halloran house will be saved. In the weeks that follow, the house soon evolves from the sprawling estate of a wealthy, contentious family to the site of the Hallorans’ emergent doomsday cult, in which each member of a growing cast of characters must vie for their spot in the soon-to-be Garden of Eden.
I’ve said before that The Sundial may be an intense introduction for those unfamiliar with Jackson’s work, and I still think that’s a fair assessment. The novel is, for all intents and purposes, a lot of Jackson. If you as a reader might have one hangup with Jackson’s work thus far, it’s likely her tendency toward dense middle sections in her otherwise brief novels, and in that respect, The Sundial is certainly guilty. But The Sundial is also packed with the signatures that made Jackson Jackson: her subtextual interrogations of class, her flirtation with the supernatural, and her coy, just-north-of-unsatisfactory endings. Like Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle after it, The Sundial’s Halloran house sometimes operates like a character of its own, looming over the Hallorans and reflecting back their generations of isolated superiority. Like The Road Through the Wall, the novel also works as a bit of biting class commentary, where the real antagonist is the closed-ranks, us-vs.-them mindset in which the old-money Hallorans operate. But most of all, The Sundial incorporates the dystopian creepiness and existential dread that made Jackson an icon. In that sense, it’s perhaps the most Shirley Jackson the author ever was.
A Side Quest for the Dedicated Reader
Jackson’s Memoirs: Life Among the Savages (1953) and Raising Demons (1957)
Six decades after the end of Jackson’s career, we have the benefit of looking back at her body of work with hindsight. We can read her novels out of order, filter through her stories, track the threads that held strong throughout her work and the ones that evolved as she did. But for someone reading the author when she was new, Jackson may have been someone else entirely. That’s because in between the hauntings of Natalie Waite and Eleanor Vance, when ghosts and trauma and murder were not on her mind, Jackson made a name for herself in another sphere: women’s domestic life. In magazines like Good Housekeeping and Mademoiselle, Jackson was a prolific source of short stories and personal essays reflecting on her chaotic life as a work-from-home mother of four small children in Vermont. She was witty, acerbic, and more relaxed than in her horror fiction, transitioning with ease from the tragedies of young women in haunted houses to the chaotic day-to-day family life in her own home. In life—as in the literary canon—she was impossible to pin down.
After building a solid fanbase in women’s magazines, Jackson published two fictionalized memoirs, Life Among the Savages in 1953 and Raising Demons in 1958. Both were collections of short stories previously published in various magazines, inspired by her life with her four children and her marriage to literary critic Stanley Hyman. They are, as critics have noted almost constantly in the decades since their publication, lighter than her novels, the zany, easier-to-digest stories of a woman trying to have it all. This makes them no less important in her literary canon; in fact, it means they might tell us even more about the project of Jackson’s horror.
When Michelle Dean reviewed the two memoirs in 2015, she wrote, “Is it ironic or fitting that some of the greatest American writing about that venerated and difficult activity, motherhood, comes from a horror writer? I can’t decide.” Indeed, just as Jackson’s horror stories provided one avenue for the author to explore post-WWII womanhood in all its pitfalls, her memoirs allowed her to carve out a space—at the height of the nuclear family and the stay-at-home mother, no less—to publicly poke fun at the notion of the “woman’s role.” The fictionalized Jackson is hilariously inept at the role of housewife, only sometimes amenable to stay-at-home motherhood, and unafraid to admit she still desires her independence. Perhaps in this way, Jackson’s memoirs are pushing up against the same confines as the protagonists of her horror writing: women’s domestic life. In the memoirs, there are no murders, no conspiracies, and no ghosts—the haunting notion behind her writing is that she is a wife and mother who has dared to admit she is unsatisfied with those roles alone.
Read Last:
Come Along with Me, edited by Stanley Edgar Hyman (1968)
Come Along with Me, Penguin’s first posthumous Jackson collection, is not quite as popular as The Lottery and Other Stories, but if you can get your hands on it, I’d argue it’s highly preferable. Published three years after Jackson’s death and edited by her husband, Stanley Edgar Hyman, Come Along With Me is an overview of all things Jackson—and probably the most comprehensive overview we have. It includes some of her best short stories, including “The Lottery,” “A Visit,” and “Louisa, Please Come Home,” the transcripts of three lectures Jackson gave throughout her career, and even text of her unfinished novel, Come Along With Me, which the author was drafting when she died.
In Come Along With Me (at least what we have of it), a middle-aged widow sells all of her belongings, changes her name, and starts over in a new city, reinventing herself as a medium. Somewhere between the lighthearted domesticity of Jackson’s memoirs and the eerieness of The Sundial or We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Come Away With Me is striking and poignant for more than just its historical context—it sees a woman unexpectedly released from the confines of married life, and for the first time, acting purely on her own unconventional desires.
In the rest of the collection, we see Jackson experiment with some of her favorite themes: unhappy domestic arrangements in “A Beautiful Stranger,” mental illness in “The Island,” borderline dystopian small towns in “The Lottery” and “The Summer People,” casually cruel neighbors in “The Little House” and “The Renegade,” the only-possibly-supernatural in “A Visit” and “The Bus.” But what sets this apart from her other collections, aside from the novel excerpt, is Hyman’s decision to include his wife’s more lighthearted autofiction, like “Charles” and “The Night We All Had Grippe,” alongside the horrors. Maybe in that sense, Come Along With Me—part novel, part lecture, part horror, part comedy—is the best we can ever know Jackson, that perennial, insistently multi-faceted icon.
Next on My Reading List
Let Me Tell You: New Stories, Essays, and Other Writings, edited by Laurence Jackson Hyman & Sarah Hyman DeWitt (2015)
As their names might give away, Laurence Jackson Hyman and Sarah Hyman DeWitt—the editors behind this recent collection of largely unpublished stories and essays—are two of Jackson’s four children. The collection also features a foreword by Ruth Franklin, the foremost Shirley Jackson biographer and feminist critic largely responsible for catalyzing the author’s renaissance in the 2010s. Suffice to say, I’m very excited about this one!
An Offering
I’m trying a new thing! Or maybe not—I haven’t decided yet. But long before setting out to write this article, I’d already started to explore what a companion playlist to Jackson might entail. This version follows the same order in which I recommended Jackson’s novels, starting with We Have Always Lived in the Castle and ending with The Sundial. Check the description for a table of contents, and check back next week to see if I’ve abandoned this venture entirely!
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Collage by the author
Flanagan’s The Haunting of Hill House on Netflix is definitely worth watching (and features stunning performances from Carla Gugino, Elizabeth Reaser, and Victoria Pedretti in her breakout role), though probably not as an adaptation of the novel. As with most of his adaptations, Flanagan borrows only a loose premise from Jackson’s original novel—the rest is up to his creative interpretation.
Do not watch the movie. Deepest apologies to Taissa Farmiga and the valiant, not entirely unsuccessful effort she put into her take on Merricat Blackwood, but if you at all appreciated the brilliance of We Have Always Lived in the Castle, do not watch this movie.
My last piece of advice when it comes to Jackson film adaptations: Shirley (2020) is a fictionalized account of Jackson’s life in the year she wrote Hangsaman, based on the 2014 novel of the same name by Susan Scarf Merrill and starring Elizabeth Moss as Jackson. Though I have some complicated feelings about the film and question whether it really works as a pseudo-biopic, it impressively captures the eerie, creeping aura of Jackson’s novels in a way I’m not sure any of the actual novel adaptations have. Shirley works best if you accept it for what it is—pure fiction‚ where Jackson is less architect, more Jackson-esque protagonist.