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?” But these attempts to reclaim Jackson have had a mixed response. Homes, have praised her idiosyncratic talent, and new editions of her work have appeared. Various writers, including Neil Gaiman, Jonathan Lethem, and A. In recent years, there have been signs of renewed interest in Jackson’s work. 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. 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. For most of the fifty-one years since her death, that reputation has stuck. 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. Contribute comic essays to women’s magazines about your hectic life as a housewife and mother. Describe yourself publicly as “a practicing amateur witch” and boast about the hexes you have placed on prominent publishers.
Here’s how not to be taken seriously as a woman writer: Use demons and ghosts and other gothic paraphernalia in your fiction. Illustration by Cristiana Couceiro Source: Frances Benjamin Johnston / Library of Congress (House) A new biography argues that Jackson’s books should be seen as proto-feminist.
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