A new biography argues that Jackson’s books should be seen as proto-feminist. Illustration by Cristiana Couceiro; Source: Frances Benjamin Johnston / Library of Congress (House)

Here’s how not to be taken seriously as a woman writer: Use demons and ghosts and other gothic paraphernalia in your fiction. Describe yourself publicly as “a practicing amateur witch” and boast about the hexes you have placed on prominent publishers. Contribute comic essays to women’s magazines about your hectic life as a housewife and mother.

Shirley Jackson did all of these things, and, during her lifetime, was largely dismissed as a talented purveyor of high-toned horror stories—“Virginia Werewoolf,” as one critic put it. For most of the fifty-one years since her death, that reputation has stuck. Today, “The Lottery,” her story of ritual human sacrifice in a New England village (first published in this magazine, in 1948), has become a staple of eighth-grade reading lists, and her novel “The Haunting of Hill House” (1959) is often mentioned as one of the best ghost stories of all time. But most of her substantial body of work—including her masterpiece, the beautifully weird novel “We Have Always Lived in the Castle” (1962)—is not widely read. In recent years, there have been signs of renewed interest in Jackson’s work. Various writers, including Neil Gaiman, Jonathan Lethem, and A. M. Homes, have praised her idiosyncratic talent, and new editions of her work have appeared. But these attempts to reclaim Jackson have had a mixed response. In 2010, when the Library of America published an edition of Jackson’s selected works, edited by Joyce Carol Oates, a critic at Newsweek protested that it was an exercise in barrel-scraping: “Shirley Jackson? A writer mostly famous for one short story, ‘The Lottery.’ Is LOA about to jump the shark?”

In a new, meticulously researched biography, “A Rather Haunted Life,” Ruth Franklin sets out to rescue Jackson from the sexists and the genre snobs who have consigned her to a dungeon of kooky, spooky middlebrow-ness. Franklin’s aim is to establish Jackson as both a major figure in the American Gothic tradition and a significant, proto-feminist chronicler of mid-twentieth-century women’s lives. In contrast to Jackson’s first biographer, Judy Oppenheimer, whose 1988 book, “Private Demons,” somewhat played up Jackson’s alleged occult powers, Franklin argues that Jackson’s sorceress persona was mostly shtick: a fun way to tease interviewers and to sell books. Jackson was interested in witchcraft, she writes, less as a “practical method for influencing the world” than as “a way of embracing and channeling female power at a time when women in America often had little control over their lives.” Similarly, Jackson used supernatural elements in her work not to deliver cheap thrills but, in the manner of Poe or James, “to plumb the depths of the human condition,” or, more particularly, to explore the “psychic damage to which women are especially prone.”

Jackson was born in San Francisco in 1916 and brought up, with a younger brother, in one of the city’s affluent suburbs. Her parents were conservative country-club people, who regarded their high-strung child with some perplexity. Jackson identified herself early on as an outsider and as a writer. “When i first used to write stories and hide them away in my desk,” she later wrote in an unpublished essay, “i used to think that no one had ever been so lonely as i was and i used to write about people all alone. . . . i thought i was insane and i would write about how the only sane people are the ones who are condemned as mad and how the whole world is cruel and foolish and afraid of people who are different.”

The chief representative of the cruel and foolish world during Jackson’s childhood was her mother, Geraldine, an elegant, rather vapid woman, who was disappointed by her daughter and who made it clear that she would have preferred a prettier, more pliable one. She told Jackson that she was the product of a failed abortion and harangued her constantly about her bad hair, her weight, and her “willful” refusal to cultivate feminine charm. Long after Jackson had grown up and moved away, Geraldine continued to send letters criticizing her “helter skelter way of living,” her “repetitious” fiction, and her appearance: “I have been so sad all morning about what you have allowed yourself to look like.” Quotations from the correspondence of the awful Geraldine are a source of guilty entertainment throughout Franklin’s biography.

Jackson’s adult life was ostensibly a rebellion against her mother and her mother’s values. She became a writer; she grew fat; she married a Jewish intellectual, Stanley Edgar Hyman, and ran a bohemian household in which she dyed the mashed potatoes green when she felt like it. But she never quite shook Geraldine’s tentacular grip, or ceased to be tormented by her disapproval. And in her marriage to Hyman she found a person with whom to replicate the abusive relationship.

Jackson and Hyman met at Syracuse University; he sought her out after reading her first published story, “Janice,” in a college magazine and deciding that she was the girl he was going to marry. To Jackson, who had already begun to experience the anxiety, depression, and “fears of people” that plagued her throughout her life, Hyman seemed a savior: a brilliant man who didn’t think she was ugly, who understood her and loved her, who believed in her promise as a writer. His main drawback was his principled insistence on sleeping with other women. He also expected Jackson to listen good-naturedly to accounts of his sexual adventures. On a few occasions during the early stages of their relationship, Hyman’s behavior drove Jackson into such paroxysms of anguish that he worried she might be mentally ill. But he refused to compromise his integrity on the issue. “If it turns you queasy, you are a fool,” he told her. Jackson, whom Franklin describes as having been primed by her mother’s criticisms “to accept a relationship with a man who treated her disrespectfully and shamed her for legitimate and rational desires,” reluctantly went along with his terms.

They married—in the face of determined opposition from both sets of parents—shortly after graduating, and moved to New York. During the next couple of years, both of them began contributing to The New Yorker, she as a fiction writer and he as a contributor to The Talk of the Town and, later, as a staff writer. In 1945, after their first child was born, they settled in Vermont, where Hyman had been offered a post on the literature faculty at Bennington College. Here, in a rambling, crooked house in North Bennington, they raised four children and became the center of a social set that included Howard Nemerov, Ralph Ellison, Bernard Malamud, and Walter Bernstein. Their domestic life, as described in the comic dispatches that Jackson wrote for Good Housekeeping and Woman’s Home Companion, was raucous and warm. But Jackson was miserable a good deal of the time, as indicated by her increasing reliance on alcohol, tranquillizers, and amphetamines. She felt patronized in her role as a faculty wife and frozen out by the townspeople of North Bennington. (She took her revenge by using them as the model for the barbaric villagers in “The Lottery.”) Most of all, she felt oppressed by her husband.