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Reviews

“Ruth Franklin’s sympathetic and masterful biography both uncovers Jackson’s secret and haunting life and repositions her as a major artist whose fiction so uncannily channeled women’s nightmares and contradictions that it is ‘nothing less than the secret history of American women of her era.’”—Elaine Showalter, The Washington Post

“Franklin’s research is wide and deep, drawing on Jackson’s published and unpublished writings including correspondence and diaries, as well as interviews….Franklin has shown the interplay between the life, the work, and the times with real skill and insight, making this fine book a real contribution not only to biography, but to mid-20th-century women’s history.”—Katherine A. Powers, Chicago Tribune

“Franklin gives Jackson the full-fledged biography she deserves. The woman who split her writing between creepy domestic thrillers and lighter memoirs of family life — and her life between writing and raising four children — emerges as a mindful emissary from the pre-feminist past, whose ‘body of work constitutes nothing less than the secret history of American women of her era.’ While her triumphs defied her times, her struggles and losses also informed her most revealing work.”—Boris Kachka, New York

“Fascinating. . . . Franklin astutely positions Jackson in a tradition of authors who wrote their way into American fears, a Hawthorne or Poe for a postwar era defined by McCarthyism, bigotry, and ‘the feminine mystique.’”—Megan O’Grady, Vogue

“To truly reclaim a legacy, it generally helps to have a big, penetrating biography, one that takes into consideration everything that’s come before and pushes forward a new and improved interpretation. Ruth Franklin’s excellent Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life is all that and more.”—Kate Bolick, Bookforum

“Magisterial and compulsively readable”—Lauren LeBlanc, Minneapolis Star-Tribune

“A gripping and seductive story that is as compelling as it is accurate. . . . This readable book tells a scary story of its own, a story about the price of talent and the dark side of love. Most important, it honors and understands the writing of one of the 20th century’s great American storytellers.”—Susan Cheever, The American Scholar

“A Shirley Jackson biography seems especially timely today, even though Jackson . . . remains somewhat mythically timeless. . . . [A] masterful account.”—Jane Hu, The New Republic

“Magisterial. . . . Rare is the author biography that so thoroughly explores and illuminates the subject’s writing.”—Megan Abbott, Barnes and Noble Review

“The author of the classic story “The Lottery” and the sophisticated horror novels about generic viagra and “The Haunting of Hill House” and “We Have Always Lived in the Castle” is finally being recognized as a great American writer.”–Newsday

“[L]ifts its subject out of the genre ghetto and makes a convincing case that Jackson was a courageous woman in a male-dominated field whose themes resonate strongly today.”—Jeff Baker, The Seattle Times

“The big literary biography of the season . . . years in the making.”–The Writer’s Block (Must-Read Fall Title)

“Carting the book around has already led to conversations with curious strangers; I’ve a feeling that this offering will have no trouble finding ­audiences.”—Mahnaz Dar, Library Journal (Editors’ Fall Pick)

“A fresh look at one of our most underrated writers . . . as well as a portrait of her midcentury milieu.”–The Boston Globe (fall book picks)

“Stunning, in-depth . . . remarkable

Vogue Fall Books Guide

Guardian Fall Books Preview: The best American writing

“A must-read book for fall“—Elle

Prepublication Reviews

“Drawing on a trove of research—including previously unpublished letters and interviews—and her own astute analysis of Jackson’s fiction, Franklin gives her subject her much-deserved due and sets the standard for future literary biographers wresting with the legacy and the unwarranted inattention of a major figure in 20th-century American literature. Highly recommended for readers of Jackson’s fiction as well as those interested in the connection between the inner lives of authors and their work.”
—Patrick A. Smith, Library Journal (starred review)

“With unprecedented access to private papers, Franklin traces the evolution of Jackson’s sensibility as a writer, building toward an ever-more nuanced understanding of the covert ways she deftly paired ‘the horrific with the mundane’ to both express her own anger and pain while also illuminating the fears, anxiety, anti-Semitism, racism, and sexism of the conformity-obsessed Cold War era. A precise, revelatory, and moving reclamation of an American literary master.”
— Donna Seaman, Booklist, starred review

“An engaging, sympathetic portrait of the writer who found the witchery in huswifery. . . . [Franklin] deftly captures the many selves and multiple struggles of a true American original.”
—Kirkus Reviews, starred review

“A gripping and graceful portrait of the mind, life, and work of groundbreaking American author Shirley Jackson. . . . Treating her subject with a generous eye and gorgeous prose, Franklin describes . . . the elements that make Jackson a writer of lasting relevance who can still give today’s readers an impressive shiver.”
—Publishers Weekly

Advance praise for Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life
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“Not just a terrific biography, but a remarkable act of reclamation: if there was ever a great writer of the twentieth century who fell victim to “How to Dismiss Women’s Fiction,” it was Shirley Jackson. What A Rather Haunted Life gives us is a way of reading Jackson and her work that threads her into the weave of the world of words, as a writer and as a woman, rather than excludes her as an anomaly. She was an anomaly, of course, because she was so smart and brave and glorious a writer and storyteller, because she was better at what she did, and had more range, than anyone else writing at the time. Ruth Franklin is the biographer Jackson needed: she tells the story of the author in a way that made me want to reread every word Jackson ever wrote.”—Neil Gaiman

“A biography that is both historically engaging and pressingly relevant, Ruth Franklin’s absorbing book not only feelingly creates a portrait of Shirley Jackson the writer, but also provides a stirring sense of what it was like to navigate (and sometimes circumvent) the strictures of American society as a wife, mother, artist, and woman.” —Meg Wolitzer

“Ruth Franklin has written the ideal biography of a figure long and unjustly neglected in the history of twentieth-century American literature. By restoring Shirley Jackson to her proper stature as one of our great writers, Franklin has in a stroke revised the canon. As biography, it’s an exemplary performance: shrewd, sympathetic, and sophisticated in its critical judgments. This isn’t the biography of Shirley Jackson for our time: it’s the biography for all time.”—James Atlas

“Franklin’s biography takes us beyond the chilling stories that made Shirley Jackson’s name — into the dilemmas of a woman writer in the 1950s and 1960s, struggling to make a career between the pressures of childcare, domesticity and her own demons. It’s a very modern story, and a terrific read.”—Mary Beard

“With her account of an emblematically American literary life, Ruth Franklin reminds us that her subject was far more than the writer of classy ghost stories. On the contrary, Shirley Jackson was the harbinger of profound upheavals both societal and literary. This is a brilliant biography on every level, but it is especially astute on Jackson’s ground- and genre-breaking work, which I will now reread immediately.”—Tom Bissell

“A perfect marriage of biographer and subject: Ruth Franklin’s portrait of Shirley Jackson restores to her rightful place a writer of considerable significance, and draws a rich intellectual portrait of the age.”  — Claire Messud

Interviews

Ruth spoke about Shirley Jackson’s New England connections on Radio Boston: ​
http://www.wbur.org/radioboston/2016/10/10/shirley-jackson