Introduction to The Jackson Legacy

by Ruth Franklin

Author Bio: Ruth Franklin received the National Book Critics Circle Award in Biography for Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life (2016). A book critic and frequent contributor to The New Yorker, Harper’s, and other publications, she is also the author of A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction (2011), as well as a Substack newsletter on biography. She is at work on a new biography of Anne Frank.

I was an editor on the books and arts section of The New Republic when the first Library of America anthology of Shirley Jackson’s work landed on my desk. My responsibilities included writing a biweekly culture column, and the book struck me as the perfect peg for a meditation on Jackson and horror. Ever since I first read it as a teenager, The Haunting of Hill House, included in that volume, has been one of my favorite novels. Jackson’s achievement in that book is a profound investigation of fear itself: how and why it works on us the way it does, and what the things we fear can tell us about who we are.

The protagonist of Hill House is a young woman. Still, as I turned the pages of the anthology, I was astonished by how female-centered Jackson’s fiction was. Nearly a generation before Betty Friedan cleared the way for second-wave feminism with The Feminine Mystique, Jackson’s stories explored the claustrophobia that can accompany marriage and the desperation to which it drove women. The themes of her work were so central to the preoccupations of American women during the postwar period that one writer later referred to the 1950s as “the decade of Jackson.”

An editor gave my piece the title “I’m Sorry, Ms. Jackson,” a reference to a hip-hop song that puzzled me at the time. But Jackson did deserve an apology—from the critics of her era, who (I would learn) often misunderstood or dismissed her; from an academic literary establishment that had all but ignored her; from the publishers who had let so much of her writing go out of print. And from readers like myself, captivated by the chills of “The Lottery” and Hill House but never bothering to probe more deeply into her body of work.

I spent the next five years immersing myself in Jackson’s world: reading through her archive at the Library of Congress, spending time with her children, interviewing anyone I could find who had crossed paths with her. As I did, I started to notice that other people were becoming newly aware of Shirley Jackson too. Her first four novels, which I had gotten hold of via secondhand bookstores, were brought back into print in beautiful new Penguin Classics editions. We Have Always Lived in the Castle, which many readers consider Jackson’s greatest novel, was made into a feature film. Mike Flanagan, one of the most creative new horror directors, adapted The Haunting of Hill House into a ten-part Netflix series that took the book as a jumping-off point for a completely new story about a family scarred by tragedy. Elisabeth Moss starred as Jackson in Josephine Decker’s film Shirley, which tells a fictional story about Jackson’s life during her writing of Hangsaman.

Many people have asked me what made the conditions right for this “Shirley Jackson renaissance.” In the last decade or so, there’s been a drive to reassess canons, in the literary world and elsewhere. In 2010, the feminist organization VIDA calculated the gender breakdown of authors reviewed and book reviewers published in major literary reviews and magazines, revealing dramatic disparities at virtually every publication surveyed. At around the same time, widely read articles by Francine Prose and Meg Wolitzer examined myths about the differences between men’s and women’s writing and the way marketing and cover design influence readers’ perceptions of which books to take seriously. As a result, more and more people began to understand the establishment of literary reputations as a political matter as well as an artistic one.

In response, the field changed. The New York Times Book Review hired a new female editor, and the balance in reviews started to shift. Other publications followed suit. Meanwhile, the explosion of the #MeToo movement in fall 2017 resulted in several male magazine editors losing their longtime perches, making way for a new cohort more open to a wider variety of writers. The Black Lives Matter movement in 2020 brought to more prominent attention the powerful biases that writers of color face in the publishing world.

While critics of Jackson’s era sometimes were frustrated by her refusal to be easily categorized by genre, today’s readers are much more open to the idea that writers can publish works across many genres—and that the boundaries between genre fiction and so-called literary fiction can be quite porous. Jackson never did the same thing twice: each of her novels has its own distinct form and focus. Of course, the idea that horror can take place anywhere, even in the coziest, most familiar setting, is her trademark.

Thirteen years ago, a reviewer of the same Library of America anthology that started me on my journey sneered at the idea of Shirley Jackson having a place in the American literary canon. In the current literary landscape, such a reaction is no longer conceivable. It’s inspiring to see the many different ways in which her legacy endures.