This kind of suspenseful badgering, with its malevolent and condescending patriarchal undertones, pervades Shirley Jackson’s work. In the novels and many of the stories she wrote in the middle of the 20th century, the polite banter of seemingly innocent common folk develops into outright mockery, subterfuge, or even violence. When confronted by an unexpectedly hostile world, Jackson’s female protagonists experience a climactic rush of bafflement and betrayal that inevitably spills over into a more private realm of second-guessing, self-doubt, and paranoia. Jackson relished untangling the process by which women lose themselves. She could stretch the ordeal out over the course of an entire novel, as she did in The Haunting of Hill House (1959), with the slow unraveling of lonely 32-year-old Eleanor Vance. Or she could foreshadow the whole harrowing experience in 40-odd pages, as she did with the start of her novel Hangsaman (1951), which reads like a modern parable of disempowerment.

In Jackson’s vision, even smart bystanders can be at once suspicious of and vulnerable to the delusions, false gods, and blunt weapons of the rabble. Reading her work today sometimes feels like discovering a detailed prophecy not just of rape culture but of the vitriolic thugs who seem to rule the internet and have somehow invaded politics lately. Seven decades before Donald Trump’s outraged mobs, Jackson unveiled the brutality and contempt that lurk beneath the surface of neighborly human interactions. From “The Lottery,” her seminal portrait of a murderous horde of ordinary folks published in The New Yorker in 1948, to her final chilling novel, We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962), in which a hostile gaggle of villagers harasses two sisters isolated in their dead parents’ lonely house, Jackson felt compelled to sound the alarm on humanity: People are competitive and self-serving, and no one can be trusted.

According to Ruth Franklin’s new biography, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life, the author came to such stories honestly. Her mother hectored her mercilessly about her weight and bad habits from the time she was a child until the last days of her life. (Jackson died of an apparent heart attack in 1965, only 48.) The importance of keeping up appearances in polite society was central to Jackson’s affluent upbringing in Burlingame, California, and Rochester, New York. Her mother’s family was firmly grounded among San Francisco’s wealthy elite, and her father was an executive in the printing business. But appearances were something Jackson rejected from an early age with her unruly auburn hair, unconventional style of dress, caustic wit, and swagger. And even though Jackson was confident and outspoken, she could find intimacy dangerous, a dark realm of judgment and scrutiny and deeply personal insults that—not surprising, given her mother’s fixation on social standing—seemed to carry the verdict of the wider culture.

Liveright

By the time Jackson, then 21, met her husband, the New Yorker writer and literary critic Stanley Edgar Hyman, she was primed to accept condescension, belittling, and neglect as her natural habitat, according to Franklin. Early letters show that Hyman loved Jackson dearly and admired her work enormously—perhaps not easy, considering that his own writing career, though impressive, stalled just as Jackson’s was taking off. For her part, Jackson was sure at the start of their relationship that she could control Hyman, and he didn’t dispute that claim. “I am proud, and completely powerful,” Jackson wrote of one of their first nights together.