Shirley jackson biography mental illness
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As a writer and mother myself, I am struck by how contemporary Jacksons dilemmas feel: her devotion to her children coexists uneasily with her fear of losing herself in domesticity.
I have been reading several biographies and memoirs while reading arcs and have been gravitating towards artistic, powerful women like Shirley Jackson- whether they felt powerful in their own lives or not. I am not sure how I missed reading this when it came out in but I was deeply engaged, losing sleep to get to the end as I couldnt put this book down. A Rather Haunted Life, indeed. Haunted not by ghosts nor black magic and all things witchy but haunted in the way many womens lives are, especially in times when making more than your spouse and writing stories that made people uncomfortable were suspect. Haunted by the demands of motherhood, a hunger to write with meaning, expectations of her own parents, by her own insecurities and infidelity, and the severe judging eyes of fans and de
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A new biography argues that Jackson’s books should be seen as ration 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 ), has become a staple of eighth-grade reading lists, and her novel “The Haunting of Hill House” () is oft
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Shirley Jackson
American novelist, short-story writer (–)
This article is about the American writer. For the physicist and former president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, see Shirley Ann Jackson.
Shirley Hardie Jackson (December 14, – August 8, ) was an American writer known primarily for her works of horror and mystery. Her writing career spanned over two decades, during which she composed six novels, two memoirs, and more than short stories.
Born in San Francisco, California, Jackson attended Syracuse University in New York, where she became involved with the university's literary magazine and met her future husband Stanley Edgar Hyman.[8] After they graduated, the couple moved to New York City and began contributing to The New Yorker, with Jackson as a fiction writer and Hyman as a contributor to "Talk of the Town". The couple settled in North Bennington, Vermont, in , after the birth of their first child, when Hyman joined the faculty of Bennington Col