Review of The Devil and Mrs. Davenport by Paulette Kennedy
By Jill E. Anderson
Jill E. Anderson is a former professor of English & Women’s Studies, who is currently transitioning in a career as an academic librarian/ archivist. Her work has appeared in: Monstrum and Media + Environment. In addition to being co-editor of this journal, she also co-edited Shirley Jackson and Domesticity: Beyond the Haunted House (2020) and Down the Road and Back Again: Critical Approaches to The Golden Girls (2025). Her monograph, Homemaking for the Apocalypse: Domesticating Horror in the Atomic Age, came out in 2021.
Kennedy, Paulette. The Devil and Mrs. Davenport. Lake Union Publishing, 2024.
**Spoilers ahead!**
Full disclosure: I don’t like Disney movies or romantic comedies because I am not a fan of neatly wrapped up, “happy” endings. They feel disingenuous and designed only, in my opinion, to placate audiences. For me, it’s thrilling to sit in the ambiguity of a novel that ends with a huge “now what??”. Those endings leave me feeling like my world has fallen away, and we are all doomed to one extent or another (though I can control that doom by simply closing the cover of the book). When endings are ambiguous, they also serve as a reminder that the world is messy. Happy endings, at least in the twentieth-century, are amplified and encouraged by the forces of late stage capitalism, and how readily a story sells. But considering how dark the actual world is, how can I blame anyone for retreating into cozy stories that offer comfort and reassurance? They’re just not for me.
My own disdain for and cynicism toward heartwarming conclusions is likely one of the reasons I rank Shirley Jackson among my favorite writers. Rarely do her stories conclude in way we would say is straightforwardly “happy,” and even if a story doesn’t end with a blatant tragedy or the out-and-out murder of someone, many end on a note of a tiny, quiet, mostly meaningless victory, a temporary comfort, or an irony so sharp it reveals an unresolved tension, a societal critique, or the human folly simmering beneath the surface. Jackson understands that resolution isn’t the same thing as truth. Her stories rarely offer the comfort of certainty; instead, they leave readers with the unsettling sense that the real horror, or even the real insight, begins after the final page.
For my taste, the ending of Paulette Kennedy’s The Devil and Mrs. Davenport was dissatisfying. It’s a happy-happy ending for Loretta Davenport, long-suffering wife of a Bible college professor named Pete, whose laundry list of bad habits and immoral behaviors is so extensive, it deserves its own appendix: he is a barely-functioning alcoholic, lying to his wife to cover his lapses; he has issues with fidelity, particularly when it comes to the naïve undergrads he is guiding (echoes of the allegations against Stanley Edgar Hyman, methinks?); he is cruel to Loretta, refusing to understand or even listen to her frustrations and downplaying her clear physical and mental illnesses; he is a religious hypocrite who lies, manipulates, and commits crimes to maintain his reputation; and he is, at least as far as I understand it, the titular Devil. Ironic, then, that his name is Pete because he is surely not holding the keys to Heaven. He is one-dimensional and a thinly veiled critique of both Christianity and the state of white, middle-class, hetero marriage in the midcentury. Rather than developing him into a psychologically complex character, Kennedy casts him as an embodiment of institutional hypocrisy and domestic oppression, functioning chiefly as a vehicle for Loretta’s marginalization and confinement.
However, Loretta is ultimately saved, Sleeping Beauty or Snow White-style–take your pick–by her own Prince Charming: the accomplished, handsome, empathetic, total package that is Dr. Curtis Hansen. He even has a dead wife in his past, confirming his capacity for lasting devotion while conveniently freeing him to become Loretta’s ideal partner later in the novel. But when I say “saved,” I mean he takes a special interest in Loretta, who seeks his expertise when she discovers she has a psychic ability to witness violent crimes by embodying and communicating with the victims. He counsels her, helps her escape her toxic marriage, and eventually falls in love with her, which, given the therapeutic nature of their relationship, feels at least a little ethically dubious. Since there is a very contemporary true crime inflection to the story, I can’t help but think of the “recovered memories” pulled from Michelle Smith by Dr. Padzer during the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, which later resulted in a now-debunked memoir, an incredibly popular press tour, and marriage for the two. Yes, Michelle’s story is very different, but there’s something still questionable about Hansen’s willingness to engage in a non-professional relationship with Loretta. Though he empowers her with knowledge about parapsychology, sharing his books, and encouraging her to trust her own instincts rather than the authority of the men around her, it still gives me pause. It isn’t about Hansen’s kindness or empathy. It’s that the novel seems to replace one male authority with another. While Pete gaslights and controls Loretta, Curtis believes, educates, and encourages her. The men occupy opposite ends of the moral spectrum, but they are both positioned as a man who is central to Loretta’s journey. I found myself wishing her emancipation had belonged more fully to her.
I’m not here to say that Loretta, with all the abuse she endures after years of being a dutiful housewife, doesn’t deserve something better than Philandering Pete. However, Kennedy’s decision to resolve her suffering through the arrival of an idealized romantic partner ultimately replaces one dependency with another. Rather than allowing Loretta to reclaim her agency on her own terms, the narrative frames her liberation as something made possible by the intervention of the “right” man. In doing so, the novel critiques the failures of patriarchal marriage while simultaneously relying on another familiar romantic fantasy to deliver its happy ending. For a novel so clearly written with Jackson in mind, it seems like a curious homage. We have access to Loretta’s mind as she slips into the final moments of Darcy, the young coed whose unsolved murder seems determined to drag the town’s carefully maintained respectability into the light, and while it clearly affects her, there is little follow-up about what that could mean for Loretta’s fragile psyche or the state of crimes against young, vulnerable women in general. What if she’s allowed Loretta to hone that ability more? Even with this psychic premise, Loretta’s invocation of “domestic witchcraft” through the small rituals that make her days bearable, and her wry observations about marriage and motherhood that evoke Jackson’s Life Among the Savages, I expected Kennedy to trust her heroine a little more or even let her explore her abilities without the confines of male approval. Kennedy grants Loretta a power uniquely her own, but only insofar as it does not threaten the male authority that governs her world.
Therefore, Loretta’s empowerment remains oddly qualified. She secretly writes and publishes reflective essays for the local newspaper, earning money of her own. Her psychic abilities ultimately persuade the police to take her seriously, allowing her to solve Darcy’s murder (I won’t spoil who did it or why unless you ask). She educates herself through the books Dr. Hansen lends her and gradually rejects the narrow worldview her husband has imposed. Yet each of these victories feels tethered to outside validation, whether from the police, the newspaper, or Hansen himself, rather than emerging entirely from Loretta’s own authority. Maybe she’s just that damaged. Maybe Kennedy wants to suggest that trauma makes self-validation nearly impossible, leaving survivors dependent on others to confirm what they already know to be true. At the same time, this dependence also exposes a society that refuses to recognize women’s experiences until they are endorsed by institutions or by men. Kennedy deliberately leaves the distinction unresolved, inviting readers to question whether Loretta’s reliance on external validation stems primarily from personal trauma, systemic misogyny, or the intersection of both. Rather than presenting empowerment as a complete transformation, the novel suggests that reclaiming agency after years of abuse is an uneven process, one in which justice may be achieved while emotional autonomy remains incomplete.
It’s also not lost on me that Kennedy’s acknowledgements explain that Loretta was inspired by her late mother and her experience in an abusive marriage. That context makes the novel’s ending feel deeply personal, perhaps even aspirational. I understand the impulse to imagine a woman not merely surviving abuse but finding love, meaningful work, and a community that finally believes her. Even so, I couldn’t shake the feeling that the novel’s insistence on giving Loretta everything undercut the unsettling ambiguity that its Jacksonian influences seemed to promise.
To be fair, there’s much more to The Devil and Mrs. Davenport than its fairy-tale ending. Kennedy writes with remarkable sensitivity and empathy about the “problem that has no name,” capturing the quiet suffocation of domestic life, the isolation and silences caused by consistent abuse, and the slow erosion of a woman’s sense of self. At the same time, the novel gives voice to many of the frustrations that Jackson hinted at through irony, satire, and subtle horror. It’s less that Jackson lacked the courage to say these things outright—she certainly didn’t, as I’m sure we can all attest—and more that Kennedy is writing from the vantage point of the twenty-first century, able to name patterns of coercive control, emotional abuse, and misogyny with a vocabulary that simply did not exist in the same way during Jackson’s lifetime.
At one point, Dr. Hansen—whose understanding of domestic abuse often feels strikingly modern for a 1950s (para)psychologist—tells Loretta that “what’s happening at your home isn’t at all normal, or good, and you need to know that.” He explains that he has seen husbands control their dissatisfied wives through “finances, freedom, [and] time,” warning that “then it gets more extreme. It can become deadly, Loretta. You should know that” (129). In the moment, Loretta’s instinct is to minimize and rationalize Pete’s behavior, a response that rings painfully true. Kennedy understands that abuse is rarely maintained by violence alone; it is sustained by self-doubt, social expectation, and the hope that things will somehow improve.
Loretta is a weary housewife, slamming a casserole onto the dinner table after dedicating her entire day to cleaning up everyone else’s messes, only to hear someone ask, “What’s for dessert?” I found myself wishing she had, in the style of Jackson’s narrator in “What a Thought,” picked up a glass ashtray and bludgeoned Pete. Call me a cynic, but there is something deeply satisfying about Jackson’s willingness to let a woman’s rage exist without immediately transforming it into forgiveness, healing, or romance. Kennedy, by contrast, wants Loretta to escape rather than destroy, to rebuild rather than retaliate, and perhaps that is the more hopeful ending. Still, a small, terrible part of me wanted her to embrace the darker impulses that Jackson understood so well. Maybe that reaction says less about Loretta than about the limits of the stories we tell ourselves: we are so accustomed to seeing women absorb violence with grace that the fantasy of unapologetic retaliation can feel strangely liberating, even when we know it offers no real freedom (for example, Stephen King’s Carrie: Carrie gets to express a kind of rage that women are often denied, but the story is also deeply pessimistic about whether that rage can become a sustainable form of liberation. Her revenge gives her power for a moment, but it cannot give her a life afterward.)
Kennedy also includes a blanket content warning at the beginning of the novel, something Jackson likely would never have fathomed existing, signaling an awareness that these subjects—domestic abuse, coercive control, and misogyny—are not merely plot devices but lived realities for many readers. The warning also covers fatphobia, a detail that feels like a direct acknowledgment of Jackson’s own experiences with being reduced to the image of the “trim little housewife” rather than being recognized as the complex, ambitious writer she was. In many ways, the novel feels like a well-intentioned attempt to correct the systemic wrongs of previous generations, including the very cultural forces Jackson spent her career exposing.
While Kennedy’s novel is a deliberate and mostly well-intentioned nod to Jackson’s domestic horrors, I found Meagan Church’s The Mad Wife (2025) ultimately more successful because it trusts the reader to sit with discomfort, both personal and systemic. Where Kennedy offers Loretta a path toward healing, validation, and romantic rescue, Church seems more interested in the psychological wreckage left behind by domestic confinement and the ways women are often labeled “mad” when they refuse to quietly endure. Both novelists have the benefit of decades of feminist criticism, psychological language, and cultural hindsight that allow them to name the forces Jackson often had to render through horror and ambiguity. But The Mad Wife feels closer to Jackson’s sensibility because it does not simply expose the horrors lurking beneath domestic life; it questions the very systems that decide what counts as sanity, obedience, and acceptable femininity.
