Episode 52 A Visit by Shirley Jackson

Classic Ghost Stories

Shirley JacksonShirley Hardie Jackson was bon in 1916 in San Francisco, California and died in Vermont in 1965 aged only 48. Though born in California, she attended Syracuse University in New York where she became involved in literary affairs. She published her first novel in 1948 when she was 32, but it was her short story The Lottery that brought her to public attention. Published in The New Yorker it divided opinion between those who thought it bold and daring and those who found it macabre and disturbing. In essence, like a lot of Jackson's work, it starts out in a realist, every day setting of a folksy rural community where everyone behaves just like we know they would, and then it turns out they have a mysterious lottery where the winner (or loser!) gets sacrificed for some undisclosed reason -- maybe just because it's tradition. She puts in such everyday details of community life that it's a real switch and bait as we think we're getting a home-town story and then it turns weird.Jackson's work has more than a touch of the surreal and I was reminded of the Argentinian Jorge Luis Borges as I was reading her collection Dark Tales recently. Her novel The Haunting of Hill House was published in 1958 and is considered the best haunted house story ever written. I enjoyed it very much. She also wrote We Have Always Lived In The Castle towards the end of her life and I must admit I haven't yet read it!Jackson didn't take care of her health and ate and drank too much. This led to heart disease which killed her in 1965.Jackson didn't get on with her mother who seems not to have wanted her much and this seems to be echoed in themes of mothers and estranged daughters in lots of her stories. Jackson was a wildly interesting character. She played the guitar, sang folk songs and could also play the zither. I wonder if she seems so interesting because we know more about her, being more recent, and I wonder if any of the old Victorian and older 18th Century Gothic writers were equally as quirky. Certainly Byron, Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft seem a wild crowd, and we know about them because they were famous and rich. Jackson told people she was a practising witch and joked (?) that she put hexes on publishers and critics who offended her. This may not have been just a joke as these were the years of the first growth of Wicca and occultism was definitely a thing following Aleister Crowley, Jack Parsons and others. Jackson suffered from extreme anxiety and saw a psychiatrist who prescribed barbiturates and amphetamines, and then other meds to counteract the effects of these. This cocktail probably didn't help much.A new movie of her life Shirley has come out this year 2020 but I can't see it because all the cinemas are shut due to lock down...There is a nice review a biography of Jackson called A Rather Haunted Life by Ruth Franklin in the New Yorker, and you can find it https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/17/the-haunted-mind-of-shirley-jackson (here)A VisitA Visit was first published under the title A Lovely House in 1950, and then reissued after Jackson's death in 1968 as A Visit The horror literature critic S T Joshi describes it as a 'quiet weird tale at its pinnacle' and refers to 'manner in which a house can subsume its occupants.'At first listen, or maybe even second, I thought, what the heck is this story about?Like last week's story, Mr Jones, this is a gothic tale. We have a large and rambling house which is full of mystery, we have an imprisoned woman in the tower (old Margaret), we have unreliable witnesses, I told trust Mr and Mrs Montague, or Carla one inch.When Margaret is being Support the show

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