the haunting of hill house by shirley jackson 1959

Eleanor has spent most of her life caring for her ailing mother, and as she comes into her femininity like a teenage girl might, she’s both drawn to and frightened by the changing limitations on how women her age are expected to dress, speak, and behave. Eleanor Vance, unmarried at thirty-two, is shy and reserved-even wearing red toenail polish is too garish a gesture for her, and she feels rebellious when she dons a pair of pants. The Haunting of Hill House takes place in the mid-to-late 1950s, and the characters within it-though self-consciously isolated from the world around them-nonetheless wrestle with the social conventions of the time. Jackson died in 1965 at the age of 48, and in the years since her passing, her work has been given a second life through the publication of Let Me Tell You, a collection of unpublished stories and essays, as well as widely-celebrated screen and stage adaptations of The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Jackson was subject to her husband’s controlling behavior for years, during which she developed agoraphobia and a dependency on prescription drugs even as her dark (and darkly funny) literary novels The Bird’s Nest, The Sundial, The Haunting of Hill House, and We Have Always Lived in the Castle gained her renown in the literary world. Jackson and Hyman lived in New York and then Vermont, where Hyman taught at Bennington College in the town of North Bennington, Jackson felt out-of-place and secluded, and struggled to gain respect and recognition from her husband as her own literary career flourished. At Syracuse University, she became involved with the campus literary magazine and there met her husband, Stanley Edgar Hyman, who would go on to become a noted literary critic. After her family moved across the country to Rochester, New York, Jackson attended University of Rochester and Syracuse University.

She had a difficult childhood marked by loneliness and a difficult relationship with her parents. Shirley Jackson was born in 1916 in San Francisco, California and raised in Burlingame, a middle-class Bay Area suburb.

The haunting of hill house by shirley jackson 1959