Nevertheless...Shirley Jackson

 It’s October! And I couldn’t let October go without talking about the Mistress of Psychological Horror, the woman who persisted in the face of her mother ridiculing her via letters and her husband being well…awful. A woman who wasn’t perfect and was aware of it, but who used that to weave magic into the stories of her everyday life, the unrepeatable, the unmistakable, Shirley Jackson. 

Shirley Jackson was born in California in 1916. Don’t let her autobiographical details fool you, she hated talking about herself: 

“I very much dislike writing about myself or my work, and when pressed for autobiographical material, can only give bare chronological outline which contains no pertinent facts.” 

As an example, she regularly gave her birth year as 1919, making herself three years younger to fit with her husband, Stanley Hyman, who was actually born that year. Shirley wasn’t quite what her mother expected: unconventional, preferring to write rather than socialize and fit in with her peers. She and her mother had a contentious relationship, with her mother criticizing her love of writing and her appearance, including her weight, which would be a persistent issue for Shirley throughout her life. Shirley’s younger brother, the traditional son of a well to do family that fit their mother and father’s standards better, once said, according to Ruth Franklin in her biography, “A Rather Haunted Life,” 

“[Geraldine—their mother] was just a deeply conventional woman who was horrified by the idea that her daughter was not going to be deeply conventional.” 

And ‘not going to be deeply conventional’ was an understatement. But their mother was not going to give up easily. The family moved east during Shirley’s senior year of high school, and she graduated in 1934. Her parents insisted on sending her to a college close to home, The University of Rochester, to keep an eye on her. But Shirley transferred after taking a year off due to depression, and at Syracuse University, she started to become the woman who would write some of the most bone chilling horror stories of her time. Some that still will make your skin crawl today. She had friends, she wrote for the school literary magazine, and received a bachelor’s in journalism. One of the people she met while working on the paper would go on to become her husband and the father of her four children, Stanley Hyman. 

Shirley and Stanley would go on to marry and eventually move to North Bennington, Vermont. Stanley was a teacher at Bennington College, a college exclusively for women. When they moved to Vermont, according to Shirley’s memoir, they had their three year old son Laurence, or “Laurie” as he was called, born in 1942, and a newborn daughter, Joanne, aka Jannie. In Vermont, their family expanded, and they welcomed Sarah, whom they called Sally, and Barry. 

In 1948, she published her first novel, The Road Through the Wall, and while it is not her strongest work, reading the story of a mysterious death troubling a town as they find that the highway is going to go through the wall around their town is a surreal experience. There is just something unsettling that, after you finish it, leaves you feeling like you saw something you shouldn’t have. 1948 was the year of unsettling stories for Shirley, because she also published the short story, which made her famous, The Lottery, about a small town that once a year stones someone to death. The Lottery was what put her on the map, and she became the primary income for her household, though according to all accounts, Stanley still controlled the purse strings. 

Shirley went on to write Hangman, The Bird’s Nest, The Sundial, The Haunting of Hill House, and We Have Always Lived in a Castle, all horror stories, and each was better than the next. Many consider We Have Always Lived in a Castle her best work. She also wrote for a women’s magazine, routinely publishing stories about her home life that eventually became two books, Life Among the Savages and Raising Demons. She called them a ‘disrespectful memoir of [her] children.” They added another layer to her fame, and through them, she was put into the public eye even more. 

Raising Demons, written and published in 1957, landed her a magazine spread, which, unfortunately, reached her mother in California. Her mother proceeded to belittle Shirley about her appearance and pointed out that millions of people had seen the same thing. Shirley replied with a sharply worded letter standing up for and defending herself, but her mother’s words had struck their mark, and Shirley became incredibly self-conscious. This was not helped by the fact that Stanley was cheating on her regularly (often with students and friends) and had, according to rumors, coerced her into an open marriage. 

Hill House, released in 1959, preceded a struggle for Shirley, both mental and physical. Having struggled with anxiety for most of her adult life and suffering from a heart problem, she developed agoraphobia. After We Have Always Lived in a Castle, she was plagued by writer's block as well. With the support of her family, she began therapy, which worked well for her, and her agent gave her the task of sitting down every day and writing whatever came to mind. For a while, it acted as a journal or diary experience for her, but eventually she began working on a new novel, Come Away With Me. Unfortunately, she died in her sleep at the age of 48 before she could finish it. 

Shirley, while remembered for being one of the masters of her genre, was also an incredibly strong woman. She dealt with her husband’s infidelity and her mother’s degrading remarks to write her novels, raise a family, and live her life as best she could. In a world where the outside can seem terrifying and the weight of the world can crush us, think of Shirley Jackson, described by her oldest son in the following quote:

“She was always writing, or thinking about writing, and she did all the shopping and cooking, too. The meals were always on time. But she also loved to laugh and tell jokes. She was very buoyant that way.” 

Sources

Cooke, Rachel. “Laurence Jackson Hyman on His Mother Shirley: “Her Work Is so Relevant Now….”” The Guardian, The Guardian, 12 Dec. 2016, theguardian.com/books/2016/dec/12/laurence-jackson-hyman-mother-shirley-jackson-dark-tales. Accessed 23 Oct. 2025.

Franklin, Ruth. Shirley Jackson : A Rather Haunted Life. New York Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2017.

Jackson, Shirley. Life among the Savages. Penguin Books, 2019.

---. Raising Demons. S.L., Penguin Books, 2021.

---. The Letters of Shirley Jackson. New York, Random House, 2021.