The Letters of Shirley Jackson

One



From Debutante to Bohemian: 1938 1944

I must stop writing letters and get to writing a novel. If you think of any good scenes for a novel covering about forty pages send them right along. I can use anything I get.

To Stanley Edgar Hyman?, date?

Shirley Jackson was born in San Francisco, California, on December 14, 1916. Her father, Leslie, had immigrated from England at age twelve with his mother and two sisters and was a self-made successful business executive with the largest lithography company in the city. Her mother, Geraldine, was a proud descendant of a long line of famous San Francisco architects and could trace her ancestry back to before the Revolutionary War.

Shirley primarily grew up in Burlingame, an upper-middle-class suburb south of the city. But when she was sixteen, Leslie was promoted and transferred, and the family moved luxuriously, by ship, through the Panama Canal to Rochester, in upstate New York. The Jacksons quickly joined the Rochester Country Club and became well-established in the city s active societyworld. The move was very hard on Shirley, who missed California and her friends there, especially her best friend, Dorothy Ayling. She finished high school in Rochester (where one of her classes was once interrupted for a few minutes so that Shirley could marvel at snow falling outside the window), then attended Rochester University for one difficult year, before deciding to spend the next year writing alone in her room at home, with the lofty goal of producing a thousand words a day. Little of what Shirley wrote during that period is believed to have survived.

She then enrolled at Syracuse University, where she enjoyed literature classes, and where the university s journal, Threshold, published her story, Janice, a one-page conversation with a young woman who brags that she has that day attempted suicide. Another literature student, Stanley Edgar Hyman, from Brooklyn, New York, the brash, intellectual son

Shirley Jackson was born in San Francisco in 1916. She first received wide critical acclaim for her short story The Lottery, which was published in The New Yorker in 1948. She is the author of six novels, including The Haunting of Hill House, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, and The Sundial; two bestselling family chronicles, Life Among the Savages and Raising Demons; and hundreds of short stories, many published in five separate posthumous collections. She died in 1965 at the age of forty-eight.

Laurence Jackson Hyman (editor), the eldest child of Shirley Jackson and Stanley Edgar Hyman, has spent most of his professional life in publishing as a writer, photographer, editor, art director, and publisher. He is the author, editor, or co-editor of dozens of books and monographs, including two posthumous collections of his mother s stories: Just an Ordinary Day and Let Me Tell You. He was the executive producer for the 2018 film adaptation of We Have Always Lived in the Castle.

Bernice M. Murphy (academic consultant) is an associate professor/lecturer in popular literature at the School of English, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. She edited the collection Shirley Jackson: Essays on the Literary Legacy and has written several articles and book chapters on Jackson s writing. She is also an expert on American horror and gothic narratives. Her current work in progress is a monograph entitled California Gothic.

A can t-miss literary artifact from one of America s most important authors. USA Today

Shirley Jackson s letters could make an errand more exciting than your entire life. Los Angeles Times

A work of art in its own right . . . as vivid and subversive as her fiction. Chicago Review of Books

[These letters are] glorious additions to [Jackson s] oeuvre. They are intimate, invigorating, essential. Toronto Star

Startlingly vivacious. The New Republic

Many writers feel that the self who writes exists in a partially unknowable state, separate from the self who goes about her worldly business, talking with friends and colleagues, cooking dinner, ferrying her children around. With Jackson, the division seems especially vivid. . . . [Here], the inner world that writes gives voice to the outer world that doesn t. The New York Times Book Review

[Jackson s] fiction, full of misanthropy, madness and murder, tends to be viewed through the lens of her personal torments and, more generally, of the misogyny of the age. What is striking about Jackson s letters, however, is that while they testify to pretty outrageous domestic double standards . . . they show very little sign of unhappiness. The mood of the missives is buoyant, garrulous and eager to amuse, and while Jackson often seems stressed and exasperated, she s rarely despairing. . . . The labors of domesticity and artistry are fused in these letters in a way that seems to me unique. The Wall Street Journal

This collection, edited by Jackson s son, brings together one of Jackson s other great literary loves apart from short stories: the letter. Written in a distinctive lowercase typewriter font on yellow paper, the correspondence offers another view of the wit that permeated Jackson s fiction. The New York Times

The breadth of Shirley Jackson s artistry is still being