Writing Rituals of Shirley Jackson

Welcome to A Narrative of their Own, a weekly publication exploring the lives and literature of women.

This essay forms part of a series around the writing rituals of inspirational literary women. At the end of this essay, I will give three key takeaways we might all bring into our own creative lives.

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Shirley Jackson was born in San Francisco in 1916 in an affluent suburb of the city. Misunderstood by her parents, she identified herself as an outsider as well as a writer from an early age.

‘When I first used to write stories and hide them away in my desk, I used to think that no one had ever been so lonely as I was…’

Jackson had a difficult relationship in particular with her mother, Geraldine, who expressed disappointment that her daughter wasn’t prettier or more pliable. She spoke cruelly to Jackson, complaining of her weight, her bad hair, and her lack of feminine graces. Not content with confining this to Jackson’s childhood, her mother continued to send letters criticising her daughter’s way of living, her appearance, and her ‘repetitious’ fiction.

In many ways, Jackson’s marriage and adult life was a rebellion against her mother’s values. She went on to become a writer, marrying a Jewish intellectual named Stanley Edgar Hyman. She ran a bohemian house in the suburbs with her husband and her four children, entertaining other writers and intellectuals there. Unfortunately however she could never quite shake the abusive behaviour of her mother, choosing to marry a man who then replicated an abusive relationship.

Meeting at Syracuse University, Hyman tracked Jackson down after reading her first published story, ‘Janice,’ in a college magazine. He had already decided that this was the girl he would marry. Jackson, who already suffered with anxiety and depression and a fear of people, saw Hyman as something of a saviour; an intellectual man who didn’t consider ugly and appreciated her potential as a writer.

Unfortunately, Jackson’s husband also expected to entertain extra-marital affairs, and worse, to tell his wife about them. His behaviour clearly bothered Jackson, but she put up with it nonetheless. Both families disapproved of the marriage, but despite this opposition, they married shortly after graduating, firstly moving to New York and later to North Bennington, Vermont.

Jackson wrote about the family’s domestic life for Good Housekeeping and Woman’s Home Companion, expressing it as a warm and chaotic environment, despite the misery she often endured. She increasingly depended on alcohol, tranquilisers and amphetamines and felt frozen out of the life of the town due to her role as a faculty wife. The revenge for this was sweet: she used the townspeople in her most famous story, ‘The Lottery.’

As well as writing, Jackson did all the domestic drudgery of running a large home with four lively children. Despite eventually becoming the main breadwinner in the family due to her writing success, Jackson’s husband controlled the family finances. Although he always encouraged his wife to write, he sometimes resented how her career had become greater than his own, and didn’t support his wife with time to work on her writing.

In her biography of Shirley Jackson, A Rather Haunted Life, Ruth Franklin states that Jackson was largely responsible for the myth that she was a practising witch. Apparently, she wrote this ‘fact’ herself in the bio for her first novel, and did nothing to clarify this later. She had an interest in magic and Tarot, and owned six or more black or grey cats at one time. Although this helped to enhance her witchy image, she later stated that it was so that her husband, who didn’t see so well, wouldn’t suspect her of having more than one cat!

Shirley Jackson wrote a total of six novels, two memoirs, and around two-hundred short stories.

Jackson is mostly known for writing stories of psychological horror and Gothic fiction. Many of her stories feature lost and lonely women who wish to escape their family lives or the communities they find themselves living amongst. Many include elements of evil.

Her most well-known works include the short story ‘The Lottery,’ and her novels The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle.

Her 1953 fictionalised memoir, Life Among the Savages, about life with her husband and four children in rural Vermont, is recognised as an American classic. It features badly behaved friends, bank managers, an oblivious husband and domestic chaos. Despite her own struggles, Jackson manages to convey a humorous, warm book about life in a large family.

Ruth Franklin’s biography attempts to put the record straight on Jackson’s output, rescuing it from the literary snobs who have often consigned her to the horror genre. She points out Jackson’s proto-feminist credentials and her importance in documenting the lives of mid-twentieth-century women. Franklin insists that Jackson’s use of the supernatural within her work is carefully handled, relating it to that of Edgar Allen Poe and Henry James in its ability ‘to plumb the depths of the human condition,’ and explore the ‘psychic damage to which women are especially prone.’

When ‘The Lottery’ first appeared in the pages of the New Yorker, the response from readers was overwhelming, initially resulting in over three hundred letters sent to North Bennington’s post office. Many were shocked and upset by the story, resulting in the largest response the magazine had ever received in relation to a single story. Jackson would go on to receive such hate-filled letters for the story throughout the rest of her life.

Jackson squeezed in her writing around the childcare of her four children and her domestic duties running the home she shared with her husband, a literary critic, magazine editor and professor.

“Fifty percent of my life is spent washing and dressing the children, cooking, washing dishes and clothes, and mending,’ she said. “After I get it all to bed, I turn around to my typewriter and try to—well, to create concrete things again.”

Jackson wrote, as many mothers before her, in the interstices between taking her children to school and lunchtime whilst the youngest baby slept. She returned to her writing in the evenings, after the children went to bed. Despite her acknowledgement of this struggle, the discipline suited the way Jackson wrote. She spent a lot of time thinking up her stories in her head whilst cooking, cleaning, and performing the myriad chores involved in keeping a home.

“All the time I am making beds and doing dishes and driving to town for dancing shoes, I am telling myself stories.”

In fact, even when her children grew a little more independent, Jackson continued to work in this way, preferring the time away from the desk rather than sitting at the typewriter all day.

“A writer is always writing, seeing everything through a thin mist of words, fitting swift little descriptions to everything he sees, always noticing.”

Importantly, Jackson loved to write. She drew joy from the activity of putting down words, watching these turn into her stories. She often produced around 1,000 words per day.

“There is delight in seeing a story grow; it’s so deeply satisfying—like having a winning streak in poker.”

Jackson primarily wrote in her large, gabled, yellow-painted Victorian home in North Bennington, Vermont for seventeen years, until her death there due to heart failure in 1965 at the age of just forty-eight.

The home was in an isolated former mill and factory town, where the family lived for many years without a car. Jackson’s husband couldn’t drive, and later, Jackson herself got a car and drove the family around.

The stories which fed into Life Among the Savages were generated in this home. Her eldest son Laurence Jackson Hyman remembers:

“...coming home from school and finding our mother typing away downstairs or at a folding table in the dining room, or sitting on her kitchen stool making notes while making brownies.”

Despite her impressive output, Jackson was sometimes not considered literary, primarily due to the snobbery around writing for women’s magazines. But Jackson did what so many other literary women of the past have done: she put the domestic role of childcare and home at the centre of her life, writing around it in the only way she could. To this end, she was a soaring success, writing many of the stories and novels which are today considered part of the American canon, and supporting her family by earning an independent living from her writing.

Although Jackson should have had far more help from her husband in the management of her home and children, most writers also have other obligations on their time. Finding tiny slivers of our day or week in which to put down words eventually makes the writing happen.

Jackson made clear in interviews that she thought about writing whilst doing other things - “fifty percent” of her time, she said, was taken up by taking care of her children and home. The time we spend thinking about the things we want to write about still counts as writing.

Jackson wrote for women’s magazines, disregarding the snobbery around this type of writing. This helped her to earn an independent income. She also wrote some of the darkest Gothic fiction. Don’t be afraid to try other forms of writing, whether for money or pleasure. It all counts.