![]() ![]() It was at Syracuse, where she was midway through her college career, that her future as both a writer and a housewife began. Jackson began writing as an unhappy high school student in Rochester, New York, where her family had moved from California. Jackson’s son recalls his grandmother as “a deeply conventional woman who was horrified by the idea that her daughter was not going to be deeply conventional.” Born in 1916 to an English immigrant father and a San Francisco socialite mother, Jackson grew up in a family that didn’t encourage her literary pursuits – indeed, her scathingly critical mother didn’t seem to encourage her in much of anything. ![]() “I’ll just put down housewife,” the clerk replies. Asked for her occupation, she says she’s a writer. Arriving at the hospital to deliver her third child, Jackson is met by a clerk filling out paperwork. The difficulty of being a woman and a writer is neatly illustrated in one anecdote Franklin tells in the book’s introduction. Franklin’s telling of Jackson’s life story is sensitively written and extremely absorbing it also makes a persuasive case for readers to revisit and reconsider this important American writer. Jackson’s fiction, Franklin argues, deserves to be considered as part of the “vibrant and distinguished tradition that can be traced back to the American Gothic work of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, and Henry James.” Jackson’s particular attention to women’s stories, along with her nonfiction work, mostly for women’s magazines, may have contributed to her unfairly diminished reputation as a serious literary writer. In this biography, Ruth Franklin gets at what makes Jackson both sui generis and familiar. Shirley Jackson became famous in midcentury America for her short story “The Lottery,” which unnerved readers from the moment it appeared in the New Yorker in 1948, and for a string of gothic novels, as well as her cheerful yet brutally honest essays about juggling four kids, pets, a house, and a husband. In the 30 Books in 30 Days series leading up to the March 16 announcement of the 2016 National Book Critics Circle award winners, NBCC board members review the thirty finalists. Today, NBCC board member Kate Tuttle offers an appreciation of biography finalist Ruth Franklin’s Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life (Liveright). ![]()
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