shirley jackson a rather haunted life by ruth franklin

Jackson’s lifelong interest in rituals, witchcraft, charms and hexes were, Franklin convincingly maintains, metaphors for exploring power and disempowerment. “The Lottery”, a simple tale of villagers fulfilling a summer ritual that ends with one of the most shocking twists in modern fiction, became an instant sensation, catapulting its author into literary celebrity. In 1948 the 31-year-old Jackson, who had been publishing magazine fiction for a decade without attracting much notice, produced a very brief story for the New Yorker that would change everything. Flannery had just died.“O ne who raises demons,” the writer Shirley Jackson once observed, “must deal with them.” Whether fiction could raise demons and deal with them remained for her an open question, one that drives Ruth Franklin’s comprehensive new biography. They drove there to interview O'Connor's mother as research for the essay Hyman was writing about O'Connor.

For example, she treats 'suspense' as if it were a genre.Īcademics might also be disappointed that there is hardly anything about Hyman and Jackson's road trip to Flannery O'Connor's homes in Milledgeville, Georgia. Another problem is that Franklin confuses genre and mode. It implies that a third-person narrator tells the story with Merricat as the focalization character. This passive voice obscures the agent of the action. For example, Franklin states that We Have Always Lived in the Castle 'is told entirely from the perspective of' Merricat. Similarly, the handling of narrative point-of-view is simplistic. For example, it treats matters of authorial intent as if they are not problematic. Other aspects of this book will frustrate academics. For others, it will be a relief not to read another cliche-monger who is clearing a space for interrogating what is at stake. For some scholars, her biography of Shirley Jackson would be more useful if it theorized those fields. In addition, it deploys Franklin's knowledge of form, feminism, history, and psychology. Her newest book balances scholarship with journalism and is as thoroughly researched as an academic biography, yet readable. She has been an editor and contributor for such prestigious periodicals as The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, and Harper's. Her first book, A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction (Oxford UP) studies fourteen different writers. Ruth Franklin has credibility as both a literary critic and a journalist.

Shirley jackson a rather haunted life by ruth franklin