Nevertheless, the callousness, especially of her mother, and the serial adulteries of her husband, the eminent literary critic Stanley Edgar Hyman, blocked her need to be loved and valued. She offers us a gifted author who was devoted to, and claimed by, literature. In this regard, Franklin’s work is luminous as well as lucid. On all counts, Franklin’s book succeeds.Īlthough it is usually futile to question the specific origin of an individual talent, it is enormously helpful to see how a writer responded to, and claimed, a subject-in other words, how a writer impressed her signature upon the substance of her work. As the subtitle of Franklin’s biography indicates, Jackson was, indeed, haunted-haunted so much so that we can suggest that her fiction was apotropaic, something of an amulet countering what shadowed her life. Franklin provides the reader with a context as well as a concept she not only places her subject within the generation of women addressed by Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963) but also analyzes Jackson’s fiction within the development of the gothic sensibility, particularly an American gothic temper. Now that so many of Shirley Jackson’s works are accessible, Ruth Franklin’s timely biography offers us a welcome comprehension of her life and fiction.
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