Black and white and dread all over: The Haunting (1963), based on Shirley Jackson’s novel The Haunting of Hill House. Photograph: MGM/Sunset Boulevard/Corbis via Getty Images

Book Title:

Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life ISBN-13:

Author:

Ruth Franklin Publisher:

Liveright Guideline Price:

£25.00

In The Feminine Mystique, her groundbreaking 1963 critique of a social system that kept married women trapped in the home whether they wanted to be there or not, Betty Friedan took aim at a popular writer who, she said, perpetuated the dangerous myth that domestic life was always fun and fulfilling.

This writer, said Friedan, presented herself to her readers as just another housewife, downplaying her successful writing career. She and other “happy housewife” writers “deny the lives they lead, not as housewives, but as individuals . . . Do real housewives dissipate in laughter their dreams and their sense of desperation?”

The writer who attracted Friedan’s rage was Shirley Jackson. Today Jackson is best known for her unsettling short stories and novels, most famously her story The Lottery, which provoked an unprecedented amount of angry and confused letters after it appeared in the New Yorker in 1948. But the book that paid for her house was Life Among the Savages (1952), her amusing best-selling account of real life with her four young children.

As Ruth Franklin points out in this superb new biography, Friedan overlooked “the genuinely subversive element of Jackson’s family chronicles”. The Jackson of the stories is not a domestic goddess, satisfied by making beds. She doesn’t sentimentalise her (very funny) children. She is an inept and messy housekeeper who resorts to martinis to get her through dinner.

In fact, throughout her career Jackson’s fiction, from The Haunting of Hill House to her unsettling stories about a charismatic “daemon lover” called James Harris, explored the many ways in which domestic life and social expectations confined and isolated women. Life in the postwar American home could be a dream, but it could also be a nightmare, and very few writers have evoked a sense of truly nightmarish unease quite like Shirley Jackson.

As Franklin points out, Jackson’s “preoccupation with the roles that women play at home and the forces that conspire to keep them there was entirely of a piece with her cultural moment, the decade of the 1950s, when the simmering brew of women’s dissatisfaction finally came close to boiling over, triggering the second wave of the feminist movement”. Her own life and that of her female characters, who commit violence or make deals with the devil in response to their designated social and familial roles, were not as different as they might appear.

Drawing on dozens of new interviews and Jackson’s extensive diaries and correspondence, A Rather Haunted Life is both an insightful reappraisal and reclamation of Jackson’s work and an illuminating portrait of a complicated woman.

A mother’s criticism

Jackson grew up in a prosperous family in California before moving to Rochester, New York as a teenager. She had a difficult relationship with her mother, whose criticism of Shirley’s appearance, husband and life in general caused Jackson much unhappiness over the years.

At Syracuse University, she met critic and lecturer Stanley Hyman, whom she would shortly marry. Their marriage was not an easy one. Hyman was both a devoted champion of his wife’s creative work and a man of enormous selfishness who always took her for granted. From the very start, he saw no reason to be sexually faithful and refused to acknowledge the fact that his behaviour caused her enormous pain.

In the late 1950s, Jackson wrote a heartfelt letter outlining all the reasons why she wanted to divorce him: “her loneliness in the face of his indifference to her and the children, his inveterate interest in other women, his belittling her”. Her marriage had diminished her sense of self. Yet she would not leave it – and despite his many affairs, neither would her husband.

If this book has a fault, it’s that in Franklin’s justified eagerness to highlight the psychological depth and complexity of Jackson’s fiction, she almost downplays the visceral effectiveness of its horror elements. There are few more brilliantly horrible lines in fiction than the one Jackson wrote after housewife Tessie Hutchinson has been chosen as the victim of a ritual stoning in The Lottery: “The children had stones already, and someone gave little Davy Hutchinson a few pebbles.”

Genuinely disturbing

Jackson’s work remains important, not only because of its profound insight into fear and isolation, but because she also knew how to genuinely frighten and disturb her readers. It is a challenge few writers master with such skill and understatement.

Perhaps the most satisfying aspect of this enormously readable and rewarding biography is the fact that after years of being defined by other people’s one-dimensional views of her – unsatisfactory daughter, cheerful housewife, spooky literary witch – Shirley Jackson has finally been allowed to appear as what she herself once called “this compound of creatures I call Me”: her complicated, challenging, frustrated, loving, sympathetic and wildly talented self.

Anna Carey’s latest novel, The Making of Mollie, is published by O’Brien Press.