technically have not finished reading this one, despite starting in August, but thats because it is so so so so good that I am savoring every word.
A loving tribute to my favorite author, One million thumbs up all the,
Annika Barranti Klein
from The Best Books We Read In November: sitelink comthebe : reread it this week and its even better than Id remembered, Hats off to Ruth Franklin for a marvelous job of synthesizing all the facts of Jacksons life into such a rich narrative,
A Rather Haunted Life is an excellent, highly readable biography of my favorite author, Shirley Jackson, It seems to have some real buzz, which is fabulous, as all modern day buzz for Jackson related books long overdue, While I loved thebiography Private Demons by Judy Oppenheimer, here Ruth Franklin takes a more rigorous, almost academic approach she in fact presents as her thesis that Jacksons writing acted as a sort of barometer to the fears and anxieties of womenespecially housewivesduring midtwentieth century America a protofeminist, she created what Franklin calls “Domestic Horror.
” I think this is an astute observation, and speaks to the fact that the mostly male read sexist arbiters of what is called the Literary Canon generally ignored or dismissed Jacksons work after her death at agein.
Despite this, Jackson was a very successful writer during her lifetime: penning the instantly immortal short story “The Lottery,” and bestselling, critically acclaimed novels like The Haunting of Hill House for which she was nominated for the National Book Award and We Have Always Lived in The Castle.
She made her mark.
One thing with which I was taken aback was the highly negative assessment of Jacksons husband, the noted critic Stanley Edgar Hyman, Though I knew from Oppenheimers book that Hyman could be an exasperatingly demanding and unfaithful spouse, Franklinwho had access to previously unavailable writings and personal correspondencediscloses that Jackson was far more resentful and emotionally battered by his critiques, demands and misbehavior than had previously been revealed, and had strongly entertained thoughts of leaving him through many years of their marriage.
The scenario of leaving ones established, shackled life for the freedom of the unknown thus played out in much of Jacksons fiction, notably in such short stories as “Louisa Please Come Home,” “The Beautiful Stranger,” and “A Day in The Jungle,” as well as the unfinished novel Come Along with Me.
All fiction writing is autobiographical to some degree or another, It broke my heart a little to know the depth to which Jackson was conflicted in her partnership with Hyman, despite their strong personal/professional bonds, Through her convincing, contextualized literary analysis, Franklin brings her subject to full, sympathetic, and fascinating life, I enjoyed A Rather Haunted Life very much and was genuinely sorry to see it end, If I have time I may write a more official review for Rain Taxi, but for now trust me, Shirley fans: you want to read this book, Five. This book was too slow paced and boring, I wanted to know so much more about Shirley Jackson, She was such a unique person and a brilliant writer, The author just didnt do it for me, She went on and on about her husband Stanley, She also had a lot to say about various family members of Shirley, I didnt care for all that extra gibberish and I found it painfully dull, I really enjoyed listening to the audiobook of this biography, It is organized somewhat chronologically, with each chapter dealing with a work of Jackson's and a general theme in her life, There are lots of spoilers for her works, but that didn't bother me even though I've read nothing by Jackson, This an important work discussing women torn between their identities as workers and mothers because of societal expectations and judgements, Thoughts soon. Okay, on pageout ofpages of text not counting the notes, and I'm abandoning this, at least for now, I recently really enjoyed Jackson's short novels, sitelinkWe Have Always Lived in the Castle and sitelinkThe Haunting of Hill House, and of course I read The Lottery when I was in high school, and this biography of the author seemed intriguing.
I was interested in the fact that she was famous for her humorous magazine stories about family life, which were published in women's magazines in the's and later gathered in sitelinkLife Among the Savages and sitelinkRaising Demons, as well as for her unsettling stories and novels delving into superstitious, cruel aspects of the human psyche.
I supposed that this would explore the elements in her life, reading, friendships, etc, that led to such an odd juxtaposition, And maybe it does, but at this point I've been bogged down for what seems like forever in the unappealing details of Jackson's early years with her not yet husband, Stanley Hyman, and I can't take any more.
The earlier part of this book was somewhat interesting I really liked the family history stories involving architects and the strange houses they built, and felt like it gave insight into the weird house in sitelinkThe Haunting of Hill House.
Moving on to Jackson's life, though, things became increasingly dull, She does not come across as a pleasant or kind person, but her unappealingness is nothing compared with that of Stanley Hyman, The author, unfortunately, includes excessively intimate details from his letters as well as one of his truly execrable poems! in which he describes to Shirley, his thengirlfriend, his sordid sexual exploits.
It was at the description of how he kept Shirley's birth control device, a "pessary", while they were apart for the summer, and showed the thing off to friends I had a horrible fear that I was going to read about how he let the other women he slept with use it, since Franklin explains that such devices were hard to obtain, but either he didn't or at least not yet that I remembered that I don't have to read any more of this.
I bought the dang thing, but at this point I'm wasting time as well as money, So. I may pick this up again sometime, particularly if I enjoy sitelinkLife Among the Savages, which is in my TBR stack, Jackson is a powerful writer, and perhaps if I try this again I'll skip forward a bit to her family years,
Shirley Jackson was fascinating and led a much too short but very crazy life, raising four kids and supporting the family with her income from publishing stories, parenting memoirs, and deeply complex novels.
Her husband, Stanley Hyman, a professional critic, was as much a complication as a support, A free thinker, atheist, with Communist leanings, he was also a proponent of free love, spending college chasing other women, and telling Shirley about it, Then, when older, overweight, notably unattractive, and teaching at an allwomen's college, he continued to search for other women although apparently not on campus, He was also the first to discover
Shirley, claiming, based off a Syracuse University newspaper short story, that he would marry that author, He was ultimately her best critic, and a decent posthumous promoter, for the few years he outlived her, Shirley Jackson, also overweight and with underdiagnosed health problems, died in, age, Her youngest son was. Stanly died in, he was,
One of the nice things that comes out of this biography is Jackson's development of her themes, All her work has underlying themes of fear and anxiety, and much of it touches on multiple personalities things Jackson herself was dealing with in real life albeit she was not schizophrenic.
In a diary she wrote,
"I am writing about ambivalence but it is an ambivalence of the spirit, or the mind, not the sex, . . It is not a he or a she but the demon in the mind, and that demon finds guilts where it can and uses them and runs mad with laughing when it triumphs it is the demon which is fear.
. . We are afraid of being someone else and doing the things someone else wants us to do and of being taken and of being used by someone else, some other guiltridden conscience that lives on and on in our minds, something we build ourselves and never recognize, but this is fear, not a named sin.
Then it is fear itself, fear of self that I am writing about, . . fear and guilt and their destruction of identity, Why am I so afraid"
The writing process, at least with novels where she would continually rework them, would actually drive her to limits of sanity.
. . but not judgment. As she developed, she ignored Stanley's criticism more and more, so he complained she listened to her daughter's criticism more than him, a professional critic while she was writing We Always Lived in the Castle.
Another cool thing was to see what kind of parent she was, Left to do all the parenting on her own, she was overwhelmed and yet a sincerely warm loving parent, no Pearl Tull.
This biography is thorough, maybe too thorough, It's all here and covers about everything we know about her, It's not a perfect biography, but I'm really grateful to have listened to it,
. Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life by Ruth Franklin
reader: Bernadette Dunne
published:
format::audible audiobookpages in hardcover
acquired: November
listened: NovDec
rating:
locations: San Francisco, New York, New Hampshire, Vermont
about the author: An American literary critic, former editor at The New Republic and an Adjunct professor at New York University's Arthur L.
Carter Journalism Institute.
A smoothly written tour through the complex emotional lifeand busy outer lifeof Shirley Jackson, a particular favorite of mine, Franklin approaches Jackson evenhandedly, with just the little bit of partisanship that it's best for a biographer to have for their subject, and she selects her incidents well.
The most dreadful sign in a biography is a lengthy section describing the person's childhood or, worse, the childhood of their greatgrandparents, but Franklin handles both Jackson's family history and her earliest years briskly and efficiently and concentrates mostly on the duration of her career and her fascinating marriage to critic Stanley Hyman.
Jackson's career is an intriguing, bumpy story, illustrative of the odd routes writers can take to success, For years, despite the infamy brought to her by the publication of "The Lottery," one of the finest and most chilling short stories ever written, Jackson got most of her money, and a fair bit of her renown, from the "family stories" she published in women's magazines and her funny, sardonic memoirs of hectic housekeeping and motherhood.
That combination perplexed and even annoyed some of her contemporaries, and I like that Franklin largely rolls her eyes at that: yes, Jackson could do more than one style very, very well.
But that "crosscontamination" followed her throughout her publishing history, with interviews playing up her supposed spookiness or else being shocked by her ordinariness while reviewers took potshots at her "wasting her time" with the family stories, which they considered frivolities.
It's probably not Jackson's ability to write across genre lines that's surprising now so much as her ability to make a very good living off short story publications and continue to be regarded as a literary success even though it took multiple novels for her to start earning back her advances, let alone getting royalties.
In addition to the fun of the inside baseball, Franklin also provides valuable analysis of the stories and novels themselves, She takes different critical paths than I wouldit's my own folly to be annoyed by biographical criticism while reading a literary biography, so that's on me, at leastand she's sometimes dismissive of genre, and insistent that Jackson "transcends" it, but despite those occasional places of disagreement, I found her approaches interesting and illuminating.
She's attentive to the more minor novels and the short stories as well as to the major works, as well, and that gives a fuller sense of Jackson's writing.
The only persistent quibble I had with the book is Franklin's treatment of Jackson's mother, Geraldine, who is essentially never mentioned without a sideswipe at her "carping" or "belittling," and whose remarks are always interpreted in the worst possible light.
To be fair, there are a few excerpts from Geraldine's letters to her daughter that are almost cartoonishly awfulmostly concerning Jackson's weightbut they don't seem like enough reason to view the woman's every assertion as passiveaggressive and to constantly link every snobbish woman in Jackson's stories with her mother.
Stanley Hyman receives a much fuller and more complex portrait here as a brilliant, loving, and very flawed man who had a firm belief in his wife's art but who nevertheless sometimes belittled and bullied her in their later years, he remonstrated her for writing letters or anything else that wouldn't bring in money and cheated on her as a matter of routine.
Franklin takes him to task for his faults but celebrates his virtues and his better moments, and there's even a genuine tearjerker in the mention that after Jackson's death, he was unable to continue using the yellow paper they had always shared.
Some of that sense of psychological richness and understanding could have rubbed off on Geraldine, as well,
That richness is given over consistently to Shirley Jackson, however, and it makes for a very readable, pleasurable biography, even as Franklin reaches the more difficult passages in Jackson's life, like her onset of agoraphobia and her health problems.
The ultimate impression is of a deeply smart woman with deep feelings that she could only sometimes express, either because of innate and trained reserve or because no one was willing to listen.
It's our good luck that she was able to translate that sense of dark, disconcerting undercurrents beneath placid ordinariness into some genuinely superb fiction, .