Shirley Jackson’s Criminal Minds

by Ashley Lawson

Author Bio: Dr. Ashley Lawson is an Associate Professor of English at West Virginia Wesleyan College. Her research and teaching center on 20 th century American literature and women’s creativity, a focus she developed while obtaining her PhD from the University of Nebraska Lincoln. She has published pieces on Zelda Fitzgerald, Dawn Powell, and Shirley Jackson, among others, in scholarly essay collections and journals such as The Journal of Modern Periodical Studies and The Fitzgerald Review, and she is currentlyworking on a book project that looks at points of intersection between post-war female genre writers like Shirley Jackson, Patricia Highsmith, and Leigh Brackett.

The long critical neglect of Shirley Jackson has been successfully remedied, in part, by persuasive arguments for her place as a master of the American gothic, but this perspective has also unintentionally encouraged a somewhat limited view of her work. Though the gothic lens can be a complex and fruitful way to appreciate the depth of meaning in this author’s texts, it obscures other generic influences, especially that of mystery and crime fiction. The omission of this influence is, likely, a product of the subtly of Jackson’s approach. Whereas her contemporaries like Patricia Highsmith wrote stories that were more conventionally crime-focused (or crime-obsessed), Jackson tended to weave components of the genre into a realist or gothic narrative, discarding traditional expectations of the form to instead draw attention to the ways aspirational American values—and especially post-war gender roles—obscured the less admirable aspects of human character. Her approach is therefore illustrative of what Lee Horsley has identified as a defining element of crime fiction of this era: “a preoccupation with the inability or refusal to conform to conventional expectations” (160). More specifically, Jackson’s adaptations of this genre create suspense by placing readers’ beliefs about justice up against a more complicated view of morality in order to examine how the idealized images of post-war domestic life were hewn by the pressures of conformity and compliance. In Hangsaman and The Bird’s Nest, as I will demonstrate, crime is linked to the technique of perspective through the trope of split personalities. This disordered mentality develops from a young female protagonist’s inability to cope with sexual assault but also the more general expectations of post-war womanhood, whether illustrated through multiple personality disorder or competing but interdependent versions of the self. 

Jackson’s interest in this genre apparently began during her teenage years, when, as a young writer, she challenged herself to write a mystery story in which any character could turn out to be the murderer. She determined the culprit by pulling a name out of a hat, “thus managing to surprise even myself with the end” (qtd. in Franklin 69). Later on, her adult letters are filled with references to her love of mysteries—much to her elitist husband’s chagrin. In 1960, she wrote to one correspondent that “mystery stories i read all the time and stanley gets furious because he is always reading something like ULYSSES which i frankly regard as a great bore” (Letters 419). Her obsession was also a means of bonding with fellow fans of the genre. For example, when the poet Dylan Thomas visited her house, these two great writers amused each other by “imagining plots for murder mysteries, of which they were both devotees, and [trying] to outdo each other in gruesomeness” (Franklin 280). It makes sense, then, that Jackson’s interest in the genre permeates her own writing. 

Like their hard-boiled predecessors, Jackson shares with post-war suspense writers like Highsmith a lack of faith in the ability of the legal system to locate and punish criminals. In more traditional mystery texts, institutions follow clues to track down wrongdoers and bring them to justice. In the offshoot genre of mysteries that has come to be known as crime or suspense fiction, the law enforcement presence is made secondary, rendered impotent, or omitted all together, and the shape of the narrative thus does not follow the traditional crime/investigation/resolution plot arc. Focus is placed instead on the causes and effects of crimes, especially in terms of characters’ psychology. Likewise, the protagonist is not usually tasked with upholding justice but instead is more likely the criminal, suspected criminal, or a falsely accused party. Attempts to restore order become less about conventional morality than about maintaining a character’s status quo or realizing their desires. Crimes may or may not actually occur, but when the worst does happen, these moments are depicted not as transgressions against the law but rather as ruptures of humanity that are the result of personal and social imbalances. John Scaggs calls these stories “whydunnits” instead of “whodunnits” (117), and they use the tropes of crime fiction to explore the way characters attempt to define their own ideas of justice and guilt. 

Nods to crime fiction run through a majority of Jackson’s novels and many of her short stories, though only her first and last books, 1948’s The Road Through the Wall and 1963’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, have plots that center around a murder as a crime needing to be solved. Road uses an omniscient third person narrator who acts as a witness to the petty crimes (both thoughts and deeds) committed in every corner of this neighborhood but who is strangely absent from the scene of the shocking murder that occurs in the final chapter. By leaving the crime unsolved at the novel’s conclusion, Jackson resists placing blame on a single aberrant bad actor. Instead, she focuses on the community’s more general responsibility and demonstrates that even the most idyllic setting has evil running beneath the surface—themes she would continue to explore for the rest of her life. In Castle, our first-person narrator turns out to be the murderer, but unlike Agatha Christie’s famous use of this trick in her 1926 novel The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Merricat’s refusal to admit her guilt until the end of the book is not to an attempt to evade the law (she has already achieved that) but rather a step beyond the deep repression of her memories of the past. The confession represents a beginning not an ending, the integration of her present and past selves. 

Jackson’s approach to crime fiction was influenced by her more general interest in exploring the specifics of women’s experiences within a society that refused to acknowledge female authority. After a slightly more traditional depiction of crime in her first novel, Jackson’s later methods evolved to explore the ways culture punishes women who do not conform. Within this framework, even the smallest actions, whether deliberate or unconscious, can become criminal, and so women have developed a number of coping mechanisms to ensure that they do not appear suspicious to those who seek to police difference. Jackson is less interested in placing blame than in interrogating the norms of such communities and the cultural ideology that pushes all citizens, but women especially, toward conformity. Though in crime fiction self-justification is often a key indicator of guilt, in Jackson’s version it is often the end goal for her protagonists. Only by learning to trust their own memories, interpretations, and beliefs can women characters move forward and survive. 

Traditional crime fiction tends to be regarded as a masculine genre, one where men are the rational, if violent knights who seek to restore order and women are either passive damsels in distress in need of saving or femme fatales whose actions threaten to destabilize a carefully constructed social order. Within this context, a male protagonist’s power of self-justification not only guides his powers of detection but also reinforces his belief in his immunity to the corruption of the larger society. In contrast, women have not typically been granted the same capacity for rationality as men, nor the authority of their own knowledge. While they are no longer barred from serving on juries, their ability to evaluate without emotion is still constantly in dispute. Because the female characters in Jackson’s fiction have internalized this view of their inherent weaknesses, they cannot trust their own motivations nor their memories of the past. They are unreliable witnesses of their own lives, and their tendency to question their own experiences affects their understanding of the crimes they may have committed. The author’s distinctive approach to crime fiction subverts the traditional trope of the “male figure as the interpreter-of-the-clues and the one-who-explains” (Anderson 42), and thus her works are less about restoring order after the destabilization of a criminal act than illuminating the cultural dynamics that produce both banal crimes and deadly ones. 

A consideration of crime fiction’s roots in the gothic may demonstrate why Jackson returned to these tropes so often. Scholars of crime fiction highlight the genre’s debt to the gothic by emphasizing that fact that many of those classic texts have featured crime plots at the center of their narratives. Crime fiction thus shares the gothic’s tendency toward “representation of excess, violence, and transgressions of the boundaries of reason and law, and “s.”  Such dynamics allow both genres to play up the same dramatic tension between excess and irrationality in opposition to a desire for law and order (Horsley 4). In post-war crime fiction, overtly gothic elements tend to take a back seat to a more realistic approach; in fact, it is often the recognizable banality of the setting and its characters that makes the crimes so chilling. The “hardboiled” detectives of crime fiction popularized by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler persisted after World War II, and their cynical world view tended to undermine or tamp down gothic elements of the genre. In subsequent crime fiction, the shift of the typical setting from the mean streets of the city to the tranquil suburbs not only pushes the private eye or police detective character to the margins of the story but also changes the nature of the danger, if not the exact crime. While murder, or attempted murder, remains the most common offense, these sleuths were joined by characters—criminals and victims alike—whose damage lay deeper and more subconsciously. The gothicisms of these texts were therefore more likely to stem from characters’ mindsets than the details of a setting. Via crimes real or imagined, the pervasive sense of evil lurking behind idyllic facades infiltrated locations where it had not previously been explored, and so a “drive to make the unintelligible intelligible” is a common motive in both (Scaggs 16).

Any setting, no matter how placid or mundane, can become threatening if the narrating point of view perceives danger. The distinctly American flavor of these post-war crime narratives is a play on the tension that derives from what Bernice M. Murphy calls “suggestive gap between the high-minded, utopian ideals with which a new mode of living was established and the rather darker realities of such an enterprise” (10). At a time when Americans were consumed by worries about outsiders and difference—either on a global level, as with a nationalistic politicalized menace, or more locally, in terms of racial and sexual difference—crime fiction, like the gothic, demonstrated that the real threat may come from within. In Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era, Elaine Tyler May effectively outlines the way the concept of home took on a new meaning within the “containment” rhetoric of the Cold War. The emphasis on women as protectors of the home and on the domestic as the backbone of the defense against global forces of Communism, argues May, had the unintended effect of depicting the home space as “a fragile institution, subject to forces beyond its control” (22). The best hope for protecting this sacred space was, as Scaggs describes, “the containment of the criminal other, through imprisonment, banishment, or death” (75), and while crime fiction is entirely centered on the pursuit and eradication of criminality, authors in this era was more likely to question whether such resolution was possible and, if so, at what cost.

After her first novel, Jackson tended to situate crime in the story’s past, both abstracting it and obscuring the actual event. Crimes in Hangsaman and The Bird’s Nest become symbols of the way fear of the dangers of the external world could affect women’s interiority, whether their sense of their identity and autonomy or their ability to authoritatively interpret the world around them. In both books, the detective figure, then, is not there to solve the case but instead to represent the patriarchal authority that guided Cold War-era American society and a desire to limit female subjectivity within that context. More specifically, both books include a sexual assault of the protagonist that is obscured within the narrative because she has repressed the experience but also because these very real crimes are all but ignored by the authorities and family members in both books. In a society where women’s symbolic meaning is more important than their actual experience (not to mention their sanity), these characters have not been given the tools to cope sufficiently with their experiences, and so they compensate in ways that only exacerbate harm. Specifically, attempts to repress their memories of a crime lead to a splintering of self that results in multiple personalities.

Jackson’s 1951 novel Hangsaman was partly inspired by a missing persons case that any true crime podcast today could milk to great effect: during Hyman’s first year teaching at Bennington College in Vermont, a young co-ed named Patricia Weldon disappeared during a solo hike. Despite a search that lasted weeks, Weldon was never found (Oppenheimer 145). Jackson does not attempt to follow the specific details of this case; instead, she asks a question similar to the one that guides genre writers like Highsmith’s approach to crime fiction: how and why did this happen? The novel, which Carol Cleveland labels “a novel of psychological detection,” focuses this time on a single character’s perspective: Natalie Waite, a young woman whose rather officious father enrolls her in a pseudo-progressive women’s college in an idyllic town that Jackson describes as “square, respectable, carefully designed without criminal or foreign or unsubmissive elements” (184). At the cusp of adulthood, Natalie dreams not of romance, nor of professional success; instead, she tends to pass time by imagining herself trapped in a fictitious police interrogation. The crime of which she is suspected in these daydreams is never clear; more important is the fact that her knowledge is being questioned by a male authority figure. In one reverie, the detective asks her to “account for the gap in time between your visit to the rose garden and your discovery of the body” (5), and in another she imagines herself at the scene of the crime, “blood on her hands, on the front of her dress, on her shoes…soaking through the carpet at her feet” (12). Though critics like Darryl Hattenhauer have argued that the detective represents a stand-in for her father (103), these fantasies should be interpreted as recognition by a young woman who is about to graduate beyond the reach of her family of her more general powerlessness against the patriarchal authority of the wider world. The reveries also provide her with a narrative structure that she can place around the formlessness and confusion of her adolescent experiences, one that allows her to defend herself against the blame that she senses from society and her family. Lastly, it puts her in a context in which violence and harm are easily identifiable and thus justice can be served.

Natalie’s tenuous sense of control over the world around her quickly crumbles when she is raped by one of her father’s friends during a party at their home. She has spent the day leading up to the event with a hopeful sense of “the preliminary faint stirrings of something about to happen” (37), but what occurs is life-changing in the worst possible way. After her father introduces Natalie to one of his friends, she impresses herself with her ability to hold up her end of an adult conversation. Feeling more and more her best self, she admits to the man when he inquires about her thoughts that she has been musing on how wonderful she is. He responds by taking her into the woods to dominate her through sex. His voice becomes mixed with the detective’s in her mind when it warns, “You will not escape this” (41). In the days that follow, she suppresses her memory of the assault and tries to focus on a new start at college, but her nascent confidence has been devastated in ways she does not yet understand.

Natalie leaves home newly desperate to find the “essential self” buried within, the “clean pure being made of radiant colors” that her family’s neighbor claims is hidden inside her (29). Focused on her own specialness, she balks at the mandated conformity of both female socialization rituals and higher education. She is disturbed by the “gleeful freed brutality” (59) and many petty crimes of her peers, and she unwittingly insults her professors by attempting to be their equal, as she did with her father. Between the assault and the realization of her inadequate social skills, she is reminded again and again that the post-war world is a hostile place for anyone who does not spend all her energy trying to fit in. Feeling displaced in this new and increasingly foreign context, she remembers ruefully how “in my own country I was accounted quite a killer” (92). Moving further and further away from the empowered actor she wants to be, Natalie beings to question her own actions, as well as the behavior of others, in similarly crime-inflected language: “Why am I talking, she wondered in shame; who am I convicting, whose soul am I selling, what murder am I helping to commit” (100). The stakes feel much higher than the circumstances of her situation might suggest, and the elevated language of crime is the only way she can express that. 

In crime works like Highsmith’s, a doppelganger trope is often used to emphasize the fine line between good and evil in the modern world. Jackson deploys a similar technique, though this time the doubling is rendered metaphorically. As part of Natalie’s cognitive break from reality, she conjures an imaginary female friend/lover/antagonist named Tony. Because the novel is mostly from Natalie’s own point of view, Jackson never explicitly confirms that Tony is a figment of her imagination but instead drops clues to both Natalie and readers along the way that this is the case. Tony arrives just when Natalie needs a friend the most, though it is hard to tell whether this new acquaintance will be her dearest ally or her greatest enemy. The second half of the novel is propelled by a suspense that is rooted in this intimate female relationship. Will it save Natalie from the mental and physical dangers of the patriarchal world, or is it a trap that will cause her to self-combust?

At first, it seems like Tony will be her savior. Not only does this new friend alleviate her loneliness, but Natalie is also thrilled by the other young woman’s complete lack of concern for what other people think. As in The Bird’s Nest, this alternate self represents a side of Natalie that she has learned to repress in order to try to fit in. Feeling less alone and therefore less vulnerable, Natalie is no longer targeted by the detective in her head, but it turns out that Tony is more dangerous than that imaginary cop ever was, because she affects Natalie’s ability to interact with the world around her. The more time she spends with Tony, the more sinister both her friend and their surroundings seem, and Natalie’s perspective of the world becomes one filled with suspicion. As Cleveland explains, “Natalie imagines that every person she sees is part of a conspiracy to entrap her: the whole world has become a stage, and all the automata on it merely actors in a play whose purpose is to destroy her.” She acts like a criminal on the run, but she cannot apprehend where her feelings of guilt come from. As Natalie begins to understand that her double may be deliberately leading her to her own self-destruction, the externalization of the Tony persona allows her to notice the effects of this self-punishing side of herself.

The reckoning between Natalie’s split selves occurs after Tony has cut her off from the rest of the world by leading her to an old theme park at the edge of town. This abandoned space matches Natalie’s growing suspicion that continuing to give in to Tony’s impulses may lead to a complete detachment from the real world. As Tony attempts to draw her deeper and deeper into the darkness, Natalie’s fear—once a burden that kept her from interacting with the world as her true self—now makes her more aware of the world around her and protects her from total dissolution. When she realizes there is “only one antagonist…only one enemy” (212), she seems to understand that Tony, just like the imaginary police detective, comes from within herself and thus self-knowledge is what she needs to release herself from the constant sense of threat that this alter ego has come to represent. Interestingly, when Natalie finally feels ready to head back to campus on her own, she again uses the language of crime and punishment, declaring, “I am innocent” (214). She understands she is not to blame for her assault, for her father’s manipulation and her mother’s dissatisfaction, or for her peers’ cruelty. She is once again alone, but she is “grown-up, and powerful, and not at all afraid” (218). She no longer needs an outside party to confirm her own specialness because her self-affirmation is what allows her to move forward. She is no criminal; it is enough for her to simply be herself.

Jackson continues this theme of split identity in 1954’s The Bird’s Nest. Because of the author’s intensive research about multiple personalities for this project, the novel has typically been regarded as an example of psychological realism, but Jackson saw the story quite differently. In 1953, she wrote to an editor: “I’ve always wanted to write a mystery story. Now I’ve got a beauty” (qtd. in Franklin 345). Similar to her youthful experience of penning a Clue-like story in which any character could be the murderer, Jackson seemed to surprise herself with the novel’s conclusion. The culprit turned out to be the “[l]ast person I would have suspected” (Letters 263). Wyatt Bonikowski has suggested that Jackson meant these references more abstractly and that the reference to a “mystery” might be meant less as genre affiliation than “a puzzle…or a maze one could find one’s way out of” or else “an even deeper mystery, an enigma that, like the unconscious, would remain forever ungraspable” (Bonikowski 155), but I argue that treating the book as a variation on crime fiction provides a useful framework for understanding Jackson’s purpose.

The novel returns to the multiple perspectives of Jackson’s first novel, though this time there is a clearer structure as the point of view alternates by chapter. This approach allows Jackson to distinguish between the main character Elizabeth Richmond’s personalities, but it also gives her the chance to insert the first-person perspective of male/medical authority Dr. Victor Wright without risking that he will take over Elizabeth’s own version of her story. Thus, just as Highsmith’s stories about doppelgangers allow her to create suspense through competing views, Jackson’s technique gives us access to Elizabeth’s interior alongside of the doctor’s misinterpretations of her situation, as well as the similar lack of understanding of her Aunt Morgan, who also gets a chapter. Though these parental figures accomplish their stated goal and reintegrate Elizabeth by the conclusion of the book, the contrasting sections make it clear that the “cure” runs the risk of being just as harmful as the disease.  

Dr. Wright plays the role of the feckless inquisitor, a “would-be detective of the mind” (Hattenhauer 121) who confronts Elizabeth during their sessions in a confrontational tone similar to that of Natalie’s detective. As much as Wright feels he is making progress on this case, his persistent belief that Elizabeth, as a young woman, is inherently neurotic blinds him to the fact that actual crimes have been committed. Jackson implies that Elizabeth was raped by her mother’s boyfriend Robin, that she was at least partially responsible for her mother’s death, and that these are the traumas that have led her to disassociate. But Wright seems less interested in helping Elizabeth to come to terms with her past than in the satisfaction he can derive from healing her. A general practitioner instead of a trained psychiatrist, he frames his relationship with Elizabeth not as one of doctor/patient but instead more like a fairy tale knight who is out to save a princess. In this case, he believes the damsel-in-distress is not Elizabeth, the first personality that he meets, but rather his preferred identity Beth, a more traditionally feminine persona to whom he is immediately romantically attracted. Dr. Wright views his responsibility not as a spiritual guru leading an unwell Elizabeth back to her true, fully empowered self, but rather as a Professor Higgins whose job is to subvert this Eliza’s dangerous feminine unruliness and turn her into a placid, composed copy of the gender ideal of the period. In that sense, then, he serves the role of the detective whose job is not necessarily to discover the truth but rather to restore order by any means necessary.

Elizabeth and her assorted personalities resist the doctor’s plans. He wants her to be the Watson to his Sherlock, but by allowing Betsy—the most rebellious persona—to take the wheel in order to spar with him, she refuses to allow this man to take over her story. Betsy is indeed the most resistant to his plans. She is a stubborn, unruly, and almost child-like personality who teases him and refuses to comply with treatment. Wright’s personal distaste for this variant delays his discovery of the truth of Elizabeth’s past, because she is the one most closely connected to her mother and thus the events she is repressing. In Betsy’s chapter, placed at the center of the novel to signify its importance, she escapes to New York in order to look for her mother, whose death she is currently unaware of , in effect acting as her own detective. This sleuth, though, lacks the experience and social awareness to adequately track down clues, and she tries to graft fragments of memories from the past onto a contemporary world that she does not understand. In her frustration, the other personalities become stronger, and her trip ends with a confrontation in her hotel room in which Elizabeth tries to strangle herself, demonstrating the element of self-harm involved in this coping mechanism. As this scene reflects, her personalities tend to work at cross purposes. Just as Elizabeth cannot trust herself, her splinters cannot trust each other, but the clues she begins to discover via these alternate perspectives are uninterpretable without the integration of the various parts of herself and the acceptance of her most painful memories. 

In The Bird’s Nest, the criminal and victim are ultimately the same person. Her resurfacing memories suggest, and her aunt confirms, that as a child Elizabeth, frustrated by her only parent’s neglect, shook her mother in a way that may have contributed to her death. The repression of this fact has not diminished Elizabeth’s feelings of guilt but instead has distorted her sense of self in a way that results in the disintegrating of her personality as a desperate means of denying those memories. The chaos of her mind is built to hide her feelings of culpability, but the specifics of Elizabeth’s situation also have a more general implication. Marta Caminero-Santangelo suggests that mental illness is often equated with criminality in American society because both types “operate outside of the adamantly enforced boundaries of law and rationality—which are often treated as one in the same.” For women especially, “the criteria of acceptable behavior is even more limited” and thus “the ‘policing’ of gender is a prevalent form of enforcement of social norms” (68). With this increased vigilance over a narrower set of acceptable standards, women are thus more likely to breach such regulations and to be regarded, at least symbolically, as criminals.

In another subversion of crime fiction norms, Jackson deliberately leaves Elizabeth’s fate unclear at the novel’s conclusion. In a letter, the author disclosed her plans: “the final elizabeth personality is a secret. this is going to be a mystery story” (qtd. in Hattenhauer 132). The primary interrogator, at least, has been vanquished: Wright has retired from his role of detective, humiliated by how much he got wrong. No longer plagued by the guilt that stems from her past experiences, Elizabeth is free to move forward as she sees fit. When her doctor and her aunt speculate about what this new, whole version will be named, Elizabeth refuses to allow them to label her. “I know who I am,” she tells them, elaborating no further because it is the newfound knowledge insider herself that matters (256). Both Natalie and Elizabeth gain from their struggles a sense of autonomy that allows them to reject responsibility for the “crimes” of their past, and thus, they also reject the alternate personalities meant to contain and control their own wrongnessdifference. Each is acquitted by a jury of one, and her record has been expunged for a new start.

In this way, Jackson’s work shares a number of themes with her post-war crime-writer peers. Her deft use of these genre tropes shows how the pressures of post-war conformity resulted in an equal and opposite reaction, stoking the very violence that such conformity is meant to prevent. Women are punished for embracing their own view of the world, whether by their husbands, father figures, and or by their own self-recrimination. So often, as Cleveland notes, “the crimes being committed here are not illegal, and therein lies their terror.” Jackson seeks to warn that we ignore the violence of everyday life at our own peril, but she also seems to suggest the futility of attempting to eradicate these often-banal forces of evil, especially through legal means or social conventions. Jackson seems to suggest that, in a post-war world which implied that transgressing social norms was equivalent to committing a crime, women’s self-acceptance was the greatest weapon for rejecting the notion of her corruption and declaring herself innocent.

Works Cited

Anderson, Melanie R. “Perception, Supernatural Detection, and Gender in The Haunting of Hill 

House.” Shirley Jackson, Influences and Confluences, edited by Melanie R. Anderson and Lisa Kröger, Routledge, 2016, pp. 35-54.

Bonikowski, Wyatt. “Elizabeth and Elizabeth: The Secret of the Mother’s Desire in The Bird’s 

Nest.” Shirley Jackson: A Companion, edited by Kristopher Woofer, Peter Lang, 2021, pp. 145-157.

Caminero-Santangelo, Marta, “Multiple Personality and the Postmodern Subject: Theorizing 

Agency.” Shirley Jackson: Essays on the Literary Legacy, edited by Bernice M. Murphy, McFarland, 2005, pp. 52-80.

Cleveland, Carol. “Shirley Jackson.” Contemporary Literary Criticism, edited by Roger Matuz and Cathy Falk, vol. 60, Gale, 1990. Literature Resource Center, https://0-link-gale-com.library.acaweb.org/apps/doc/H1100001373/LitRC?u=wesleyan&sid=LitRC&xid=16cb8029

Franklin, Ruth. Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life. Liveright, 2016. 

Hattenhauer, Darryl. Shirley Jackson’s American Gothic, SUNY UP, 2003.

Horsley, Lee. Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction. Oxford UP, 2005.

Jackson, Shirley. The Bird’s Nest. 1954. Penguin, 2014.

—. Hangsaman. 1951. Penguin, 2013.

—. The Letters of Shirley Jackson, edited by Laurence Jackson Hyman, Random House, 2021.

—. The Road Through the Wall. 1948. Penguin, 2013.

—. We Have Always Lived in the Castle. 1962. Penguin, 2006.

May, ElaineTyler. Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era. Basic Books, 1988.

Murphy, Bernice M. The Suburban Gothic in American Popular Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.

Oppenheimer, Judith. Private Demons: The Life of Shirley Jackson. Ballantine, 1989.

Priestman, Martin, editor. The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction. Cambridge UP, 2003.

Scaggs, John. Crime Fiction: The New Critical Idiom. Routledge, 2005.