“And the first thing they did was segregate me” goes the opening line of Shirley Jackson’s 1941 short story in the New Republic. In the enigmatically titled “My Life with R. H. Macy,” an unnamed Macy’s shopgirl narrates her first day at the store until the moment she abruptly walks off the job forever. Although this was Jackson’s first publication in a commercial magazine, the first sentence is typical of the blunt and uncanny style for which she would later become known. The story also prefigures a career in which she’d frequently be discriminated against and misunderstood. She was 25 at the time. This is how the magazine’s bio line introduced her to the public: “Shirley Jackson, the wife of Stanley Hyman, is living in New Hampshire and writing a novel.”

SHIRLEY JACKSON: A RATHER HAUNTED LIFE by Ruth Franklin Liveright, 624 pp., $35.00

Shirley Jackson the novelist and Shirley Jackson the wife could not have been more at odds with one another, nor more intimately entwined. While Jackson would come to out-publish and out-earn Hyman—an influential literary critic of his day—Jackson would not escape her dual identity, forced to negotiate the dissonance of being both domestic caretaker and professional author during a period that produced such feminist critiques as Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963). (Friedan’s book even condescendingly characterizes Jackson as suffering the false consciousness of considering herself always housewife before writer.) How exactly do we begin to know a life—not to mention a person—so muddled with paradoxes and contradictions?

Jackson’s output is itself divisive. Her fiction walks an uncanny line between documentary and fantasy. It is at once banal and otherworldly, highly specific and symbolic, too close to home and yet still unfamiliar. Readers have difficulty reading her gothic tales alongside the more autobiographical work. When her second novel Hangsaman—arguably her most explicitly autobiographical—came out in 1951, it was widely criticized for being too obscure, as was her subsequent novel, The Bird’s Nest, published three years later. But her domestic memoirs Life Among the Savages (1953) and Raising Demons (1957) were greeted with another form of bewilderment: Why was a prose stylist of Jackson’s caliber wasting her time with such trivialities? Reviewers responded to Jackson’s penultimate novel The Haunting of Hill House (1959) with almost unanimous praise. Even then, readers were unsure whether it was simply a horror thriller or a novel “about” something.

In trying to slot Jackson into one of her many roles—wife or author, popular genre writer or highbrow novelist, mother or witch—critics have repeatedly failed to account for Jackson as a total person, complex enough for sustained and serious study. While Jackson’s works are increasingly becoming accepted as part of the American canon today, her autobiographical fiction still tends to be considered more “minor.” As Jonathan Lethem writes in his introduction to the 2006 reissue of We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Jackson is “both perpetually underrated and persistently mischaracterized as a writer of upscale horror.” That seems to have finally begun to change.

Ruth Franklin’s new biography Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life has been keenly anticipated by both readers of Franklin and Jackson. Over half a century after the novelist’s death, it is perhaps surprising that this is only the second biography of Jackson, considering how autobiographical her writing often was. But having been underrated throughout her life, Jackson is at last experiencing a revival. Elaine Showalter has called her one of the most important writers of the mid-twentieth century; Joyce Carol Oates edited a Library of America collection of Jackson’s work; and the afterlife of her infamous story “The Lottery” remains alive and well in popular culture (see The Hunger Games). A Shirley Jackson biography seems especially timely today, even though Jackson, as with many of her stories, remains somewhat mythically timeless.