A review by alexisrt
Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life by Ruth Franklin

5.0

My first encounter with Shirley Jackson was in the fourth grade, when we read "Charles," and it made an impression I did not forget. It was a few years later that I discovered her fiction, and I've been a fan ever since. I've been waiting for this book since I read the excerpts in the New Yorker. It is the best kind of literary biography--an analysis of her life, her complicated marriage to Stanley Hyman (an accomplished writer and critic in his own right), and her work. Whether in a lighthearted domestic memoir or an apparent horror tale, Jackson focused on the lives of women--their relationships, their ties to domesticity, their place in their communities.