Shirley Jackson Article

[joysilence]

I'm sure many of you are fans of Shirley Jackson, and I recently enjoyed this article by Paula Guran,"Shirley Jackson and The Haunting Of Hill House", from the DarkEcho website. The article was written around the time the Jan de Bont remake of the classic horror film The Haunting hit the screens, and looks at the links between Jackson's troubled personal life (uppers! downers! too much food! an old-fashioned husband! psychosis!) and her work - with much more dignity than my silly post suggests. A woman ahead of her time in that she juggled a writing career with the demands of her family, Jackson was probably among the first middle-class women to discover that "having it all" often means "doing it all" as well. However, she was able to take the struggles and terrors of everyday small-town life and transform them into classy fiction in an inspiring way.