Ruth Franklin

Instantly heralded for its "masterful" and "thrilling" portrayal (Boston Globe), Shirley Jackson reveals the tumultuous life and inner darkness of the literary genius behind such classics as "The Lottery" and The Haunting of Hill House. In this "remarkable act of reclamation" (Neil Gaiman), Ruth Franklin envisions Jackson as "belonging to the great tradition of Hawthorne, Poe and James" (New York Times Book Review) and demonstrates how her unique contribution to the canon "so uncannily channeled women's nightmares and contradictions that it is "nothing less than the secret history of American women of her era'" (Washington Post). Franklin investigates the "interplay between the life, the work, and the times with real skill and insight, making this fine book a real contribution not only to biography, but to mid-20th-century women's history" (Chicago Tribune). "Wisely rescu[ing] Shirley Jackson from any semblance of obscurity" (Lena Dunham), Franklin's invigorating portrait stands as the definitive biography of a generational avatar and an American literary genius. 60 illustrations

A Rather Haunted Life

Shirley Jackson

Laura

I'm told this is a biography on Shirley Jackson. Certainly, it says so in big letters on the cover. At times, however, I think Ruth Franklin would rather write about Stanley Hyman, anti-semitism, the Salem witch trials, the secret life of the fifties housewife, and Betty Friedan. None of these, with the exception of the Salem witch trials, are topics I am particularly interested in. Even if I was, I don't think a Shirley Jackson biography would be my go-to source of information on such things.

The obsession Ruth Franklin has for Betty Friedan becomes especially funny, in a dark sort of way, when she admits that Friedan disparaged Jackson as a writer of ephemeral housewife fluff, intent on brainwashing young girls to accept a life of laundry and children. 

One of the biggest problems I have with this biography is the same one that befell Mark Dery's Born to Be Posthumous: The Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius of Edward Gorey. See, in my mind there are two types of biographies- the type that tells the life of the writer in a straight-forward and no-nonsense way, avoiding making absolute claims on the life the subject based on the author's analysis of his or her work, and the type that devotes the majority of the biography to analysising the works of subject and drawing conclusions based on that. In general, I find that straight male writers tend to be the subjects of type one, and gay and female writers tend to be the subject of type two. What a shame.

Indeed, A Rather Haunted Life is, in my opinion, a type two biography. In fact, it's a little baffling that, based on the wealth of information Franklin had from Jackson's living children, she should rely so heavily on making claims about Jackson's life based on her own interpretations of Jackson's novels and stories. She spends a good deal of time tracing or attempting to trace a scene of sexual assault in Hangsaman back to something that happened in Jackson's life, when I couldn't help but wonder if perhaps not everything in that book was autobiographical after all. We must, after all, allow the novelist his (her, in this case) imagination, to paraphrase a Waugh quote. 

I also took issue with Franklin's interpretation of We Have Always Lived in the Castle. I certainly did not view it as a feminist statement about two women shutting themselves off male power willingly. The ending is not empowering as much as it is horrific. Constance, after finally allowing herself to taste freedom, to dream of a life outside the Blackwood estate, is again a prisoner of the house, now in ruins. If Franklin decided to spend more than three pages (out of this nearly five-hundred page, not counting the bibliography, biography) on Jackson's agoraphobia, certainly this interpretation of Castle, which is not by any means an uncommon one, would have been a much more accurate one than another bog-standard feminist reading of a book by an author who never really embraced the feminist label. But of course, I don't mean to draw conclusions about an author's life based on the books she wrote. 

The question that all biographies should strive to answer is "Who is (subject matter)?" After reading A Rather Haunted Life, I feel as if I could have read her Wikipedia page and gotten just as much information. In a dark twist, I think I know more about Stanley Hyman than I do about Shirley Jackson. Often, Franklin seems more concerned with perpetrating the "tragedy" of Jackson than writing about her as a person, more interested in framing her as a victim of the oppressive gender politics of the fifties. I admire Franklin's desire to bring Jackson back into the public eye, but it's sad that she remains so pigeon-holed as a writer who was a victim of her time.

Shirley Jackson A Rather Haunted Life

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