![]() ![]() ![]() For while horrible things commonly occur inside Jackson’s Gothic-style homes, even horribler things happen outside them. Jackson wrote novels and stories about people who loved the claustrophobic confines of their homes, but who simultaneously (and often sensibly) feared the wider outside world that threatened their sense of coherency and plenitude. As a result of these same characteristics, she may also be one of the most unfairly disregarded writers of her generation - a condition that should be rectified by Ruth Franklin’s fine new biography. In many ways, she was one of her generation’s most representative American writers: insular, devoted to family and generally disinterested in the wider political world that extended beyond her very lived-in and reportedly messy home in rural Vermont. ![]() And in her final years, she suffered an intensification of her lifelong agoraphobia that made it difficult to venture beyond her front yard. She rarely traveled one of her last essays was titled “No, I Don’t Want to Go to Europe.” When she wasn’t writing (often in the kitchen between meals) she spent her days absorbed by the intimate daily pleasures and turmoils of her husband and four children. Much like Nathaniel Hawthorne, a writer she admired, Shirley Jackson was one of the most house-bound of American novelists. ![]()
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