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The Letters of Shirley Jackson
A bewitchingly brilliant collection of never-before-published letters from the renowned author of "The Lottery" and The Haunting of Hill House
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY KIRKUS REVIEWS • "This biography-through-letters gives an intimate and warm voice to the imagination behind the treasury of uncanny tales that is Shirley Jackson's legacy."-Joyce Carol Oates
Shirley Jackson is one of the most important American authors of the last hundred years and among our greatest chroniclers of the female experience. This extraordinary compilation of personal correspondence has all the hallmarks of Jackson's beloved fiction: flashes of the uncanny in the domestic, sparks of horror in the quotidian, and the veins of humor that run through good times and bad.
i am having a fine time doing a novel with my left hand and a long story-with as many levels as grand central station-with my right hand, stirring chocolate pudding with a spoon held in my teeth, and tuning the television with both feet.
Written over the course of nearly three decades, from Jackson's college years to six days before her early death at the age of forty-eight, these letters become the autobiography Shirley Jackson never wrote. As well as being a bestselling author, Jackson spent much of her adult life as a mother of four in Vermont, and the landscape here is often the everyday: raucous holidays and trips to the dentist, overdue taxes and frayed lines of Christmas lights, new dogs and new babies. But in recounting these events to family, friends, and colleagues, she turns them into remarkable stories: entertaining, revealing, and wise. At the same time, many of these letters provide fresh insight into the genesis and progress of Jackson's writing over nearly three decades.
The novel is getting sadder. It's always such a strange feeling-I know something's going to happen, and those poor people in the book don't; they just go blithely on their ways.
Compiled and edited by her elder son, Laurence Jackson Hyman, in consultation with Jackson scholar Bernice M. Murphy and featuring Jackson's own witty line drawings, this intimate collection holds the beguiling prism of Shirley Jackson-writer and reader, mother and daughter, neighbor and wife-up to the light.
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY KIRKUS REVIEWS • "This biography-through-letters gives an intimate and warm voice to the imagination behind the treasury of uncanny tales that is Shirley Jackson's legacy."-Joyce Carol Oates
Shirley Jackson is one of the most important American authors of the last hundred years and among our greatest chroniclers of the female experience. This extraordinary compilation of personal correspondence has all the hallmarks of Jackson's beloved fiction: flashes of the uncanny in the domestic, sparks of horror in the quotidian, and the veins of humor that run through good times and bad.
i am having a fine time doing a novel with my left hand and a long story-with as many levels as grand central station-with my right hand, stirring chocolate pudding with a spoon held in my teeth, and tuning the television with both feet.
Written over the course of nearly three decades, from Jackson's college years to six days before her early death at the age of forty-eight, these letters become the autobiography Shirley Jackson never wrote. As well as being a bestselling author, Jackson spent much of her adult life as a mother of four in Vermont, and the landscape here is often the everyday: raucous holidays and trips to the dentist, overdue taxes and frayed lines of Christmas lights, new dogs and new babies. But in recounting these events to family, friends, and colleagues, she turns them into remarkable stories: entertaining, revealing, and wise. At the same time, many of these letters provide fresh insight into the genesis and progress of Jackson's writing over nearly three decades.
The novel is getting sadder. It's always such a strange feeling-I know something's going to happen, and those poor people in the book don't; they just go blithely on their ways.
Compiled and edited by her elder son, Laurence Jackson Hyman, in consultation with Jackson scholar Bernice M. Murphy and featuring Jackson's own witty line drawings, this intimate collection holds the beguiling prism of Shirley Jackson-writer and reader, mother and daughter, neighbor and wife-up to the light.
Editorial Reviews
"A can't-miss literary artifact from one of America's most important authors."-USA Today
"Shirley Jackson's letters could make an errand more exciting than your entire life."-Los Angeles Times
"A work of art in its own right . . . as vivid and subversive as her fiction."-Chicago Review of Books
"[These letters are] glorious additions to [Jackson's] oeuvre. They are intimate, invigorating, essential."-Toronto Star
"Startlingly vivacious."-The New Republic
"Many writers feel that the self who writes exists in a partially unknowable state, separate from the self who goes about her worldly business, talking with friends and colleagues, cooking dinner, ferrying her children around. With Jackson, the division seems especially vivid. . . . [Here], the inner world that writes gives voice to the outer world that doesn't."-The New York Times Book Review
"[Jackson's] fiction, full of misanthropy, madness and murder, tends to be viewed through the lens of her personal torments and, more generally, of the misogyny of the age. What is striking about Jackson's letters, however, is that while they testify to pretty outrageous domestic double standards . . . they show very little sign of unhappiness. The mood of the missives is buoyant, garrulous and eager to amuse, and while Jackson often seems stressed and exasperated, she's rarely despairing. . . . The labors of domesticity and artistry are fused in these letters in a way that seems to me unique."-The Wall Street Journal
"This collection, edited by Jackson's son, brings together one of Jackson's other great literary loves apart from short stories: the letter. Written in a distinctive lowercase typewriter font on yellow paper, the correspondence offers another view of the wit that permeated Jackson's fiction."-The New York Times
"The breadth of Shirley Jackson's artistry is still being recognized. This intimate collection of her correspondence makes us feel the odds against which this working mother, dau...
"Shirley Jackson's letters could make an errand more exciting than your entire life."-Los Angeles Times
"A work of art in its own right . . . as vivid and subversive as her fiction."-Chicago Review of Books
"[These letters are] glorious additions to [Jackson's] oeuvre. They are intimate, invigorating, essential."-Toronto Star
"Startlingly vivacious."-The New Republic
"Many writers feel that the self who writes exists in a partially unknowable state, separate from the self who goes about her worldly business, talking with friends and colleagues, cooking dinner, ferrying her children around. With Jackson, the division seems especially vivid. . . . [Here], the inner world that writes gives voice to the outer world that doesn't."-The New York Times Book Review
"[Jackson's] fiction, full of misanthropy, madness and murder, tends to be viewed through the lens of her personal torments and, more generally, of the misogyny of the age. What is striking about Jackson's letters, however, is that while they testify to pretty outrageous domestic double standards . . . they show very little sign of unhappiness. The mood of the missives is buoyant, garrulous and eager to amuse, and while Jackson often seems stressed and exasperated, she's rarely despairing. . . . The labors of domesticity and artistry are fused in these letters in a way that seems to me unique."-The Wall Street Journal
"This collection, edited by Jackson's son, brings together one of Jackson's other great literary loves apart from short stories: the letter. Written in a distinctive lowercase typewriter font on yellow paper, the correspondence offers another view of the wit that permeated Jackson's fiction."-The New York Times
"The breadth of Shirley Jackson's artistry is still being recognized. This intimate collection of her correspondence makes us feel the odds against which this working mother, dau...
Readers Top Reviews
SundayAtDuskS. La
There were two times while reading this ARC about Shirley Jackson that I wanted to cry. The first time was when I saw that the letters to Stanley Hyman, which cover the first 18% of the Kindle edition, are an unreadable mess. The second time was during the last 10% of the book when I knew the letters would end soon, because Shirley Jackson was going to die soon, and there would be no more letters to anyone. Let’s look at the first part of the ARC . . . since Ms. Jackson often wrote letters without using capitalization, her eldest son Laurence Hyman thought they should be printed that way. Well, there is a reason that correct capitalization, grammar, and punctuation are important when publishing a book. Namely, those things help the reader to easily read what was written, which in turn helps the reader to better understand what the writer was saying and thinking. Mr. Hyman obviously does not feel that way, but stated in his intro that the letters were not correctly capitalized . . . obviously as well as not correctly punctuated or grammatically corrected . . . for this book because: “Shirley’s habit of writing most everything in lowercase has been preserved here because it reflects her personality nearly as much as the letters’ contents.” It reflects her “playfulness”. Sure. While having such a difficult time trying to make out what was being said in the letters, I felt nothing but happiness as Ms. Jackson’s personality and playfulness shined through the mess. The heck with what she was actually saying in the letters! That’s trivial. After trying to read the letters to Stanley Hyman, after then starting to skim them, I eventually gave up. Forget it. It’s the editor’s job to clean up messy manuscripts, not the reader’s job. In addition, should they have been published in the first place? Just because a writer becomes famous does not mean everything she or he ever wrote should be published. No writer would want that, except an extremely narcissistic one. Shirley Jackson never struck me as being that way. Instead, she seemed to be someone genuinely concerned about her personal privacy not being invaded by the public. It was her husband who repeatedly told her to make sure to tell her parents to keep her letters to them. One suspects he was thinking of future publication and payment, because he always seemed to see his wife as a cash cow and treated her accordingly. For example, since her letters weren't going to provide current cash, he repeatedly reprimanded her for using her writing time to write them in the first place! Correct capitalization was also not used in the many letters to her parents, but those were usually not difficult to read, because she was not rambling in a free association way. It’s important to note, however, that those letters to her mother did not reflect the true relationship between them. Only one u...
Nikki DSundayAtDu
A writer's life depicted beautifully through her letters. I cannot get over that she died at 48. An enormous loss.
MichaelNikki DSun
Let me start by saying that I love Shirley Jackson, and I continue to believe that she remains underrated in the world of literary greats. As such, I am always thrilled when there is a posthumous collection of her stories that gets published, or even when her classic works are reissued. The letters provide insight into Ms. Jackson’s daily life that allows us to know her better than any biography could do. And her early love letters to her husband-to-be make the later letters even more poignant and heart breaking. The 600 pages of letters to her parents, husband, children, agent and fans simply fly by, and made me sad that letter writing is so out of fashion.
Short Excerpt Teaser
One
• • •
From Debutante to Bohemian: 1938–1944
I must stop writing letters and get to writing a novel. If you think of any good scenes for a novel covering about forty pages send them right along. I can use anything I get.
-To Stanley Edgar Hyman?, date?
Shirley Jackson was born in San Francisco, California, on December 14, 1916. Her father, Leslie, had immigrated from England at age twelve with his mother and two sisters and was a self-made successful business executive with the largest lithography company in the city. Her mother, Geraldine, was a proud descendant of a long line of famous San Francisco architects and could trace her ancestry back to before the Revolutionary War.
Shirley primarily grew up in Burlingame, an upper-middle-class suburb south of the city. But when she was sixteen, Leslie was promoted and transferred, and the family moved-luxuriously, by ship, through the Panama Canal-to Rochester, in upstate New York. The Jacksons quickly joined the Rochester Country Club and became well-established in the city's active societyworld. The move was very hard on Shirley, who missed California and her friends there, especially her best friend, Dorothy Ayling. She finished high school in Rochester (where one of her classes was once interrupted for a few minutes so that Shirley could marvel at snow falling outside the window), then attended Rochester University for one difficult year, before deciding to spend the next year writing alone in her room at home, with the lofty goal of producing a thousand words a day. Little of what Shirley wrote during that period is believed to have survived.
She then enrolled at Syracuse University, where she enjoyed literature classes, and where the university's journal, Threshold, published her story, "Janice," a one-page conversation with a young woman who brags that she has that day attempted suicide. Another literature student, Stanley Edgar Hyman, from Brooklyn, New York, the brash, intellectual son of a Jewish second-generation wholesale paper merchant, read her story and vowed on the spot to find and marry its author.
Shirley and Stanley met on March 3, 1938, in the library listening room, and an intellectual connection quickly developed into a romantic one. These letters begin just three months after they met, when both Shirley and Stanley are on summer break, she at home in Rochester, and he at first at home in Brooklyn and then rooming with his friend Walter Bernstein at Dartmouth, then working at a paper mill in Erving, Massachussetts.
This is the earliest known surviving letter of Shirley's. She is twenty-one, and he is about to turn nineteen.
[To Stanley Edgar Hyman]
tuesday [june 7, 1938]
portrait of the artist at work. seems i brought a collection of miscellaneous belongings home from school, among them a c and c hat which bewilders gaddamnthatword my little brother. he says if its a hat why doesn't it have signatures all over it. mother seems to think i'm insane, and closes her eyes in a pained fashion when i call her chum. she also tells me that love or no love i have to eat and when i say eatschmeat she says what did you say and for a minute icy winds are blowing. there has been hell breaking loose ever since mother woke me this morning by telling me that that was a letter from dartmouth that the dog was eating.when she came in an hour later and found me reading the letter for the fifth time she began to be curious and asked me all sorts of questions about you. yes, she got it all. consequently there was a rather nice scene, me coming off decidedly the worse, since mother quite unfairly enlisted alta's assistance and alta went and made a cake and i like cake. mother says, in effect: go on and be a damn fool but don't tell your father. i had to cry rather loudly though. which means that you are going to meet a good deal more opposition than i had counted on. i think mother was mad because she took your long distance call the other day and the big shot was expecting an important business call and he was quite excited when the operator told him that the party at the other end of the line wasn't going to pay. yes, and mother says to tell you that any more letters arriving with postage due and she will either steam the letters open since they belong to her since she practically bought them or she will start taking the postage out of my allowance.
however all in all she is being rather sweet, and more intelligent than i gave her credit for, since she absolutely refuses to forbid me to see you which means that now i have no reason to be romantically clandestine. disappointing when i'd already picked out a hollow oak tree. which brings me to the point: if you love me so damn m...
• • •
From Debutante to Bohemian: 1938–1944
I must stop writing letters and get to writing a novel. If you think of any good scenes for a novel covering about forty pages send them right along. I can use anything I get.
-To Stanley Edgar Hyman?, date?
Shirley Jackson was born in San Francisco, California, on December 14, 1916. Her father, Leslie, had immigrated from England at age twelve with his mother and two sisters and was a self-made successful business executive with the largest lithography company in the city. Her mother, Geraldine, was a proud descendant of a long line of famous San Francisco architects and could trace her ancestry back to before the Revolutionary War.
Shirley primarily grew up in Burlingame, an upper-middle-class suburb south of the city. But when she was sixteen, Leslie was promoted and transferred, and the family moved-luxuriously, by ship, through the Panama Canal-to Rochester, in upstate New York. The Jacksons quickly joined the Rochester Country Club and became well-established in the city's active societyworld. The move was very hard on Shirley, who missed California and her friends there, especially her best friend, Dorothy Ayling. She finished high school in Rochester (where one of her classes was once interrupted for a few minutes so that Shirley could marvel at snow falling outside the window), then attended Rochester University for one difficult year, before deciding to spend the next year writing alone in her room at home, with the lofty goal of producing a thousand words a day. Little of what Shirley wrote during that period is believed to have survived.
She then enrolled at Syracuse University, where she enjoyed literature classes, and where the university's journal, Threshold, published her story, "Janice," a one-page conversation with a young woman who brags that she has that day attempted suicide. Another literature student, Stanley Edgar Hyman, from Brooklyn, New York, the brash, intellectual son of a Jewish second-generation wholesale paper merchant, read her story and vowed on the spot to find and marry its author.
Shirley and Stanley met on March 3, 1938, in the library listening room, and an intellectual connection quickly developed into a romantic one. These letters begin just three months after they met, when both Shirley and Stanley are on summer break, she at home in Rochester, and he at first at home in Brooklyn and then rooming with his friend Walter Bernstein at Dartmouth, then working at a paper mill in Erving, Massachussetts.
This is the earliest known surviving letter of Shirley's. She is twenty-one, and he is about to turn nineteen.
[To Stanley Edgar Hyman]
tuesday [june 7, 1938]
portrait of the artist at work. seems i brought a collection of miscellaneous belongings home from school, among them a c and c hat which bewilders gaddamnthatword my little brother. he says if its a hat why doesn't it have signatures all over it. mother seems to think i'm insane, and closes her eyes in a pained fashion when i call her chum. she also tells me that love or no love i have to eat and when i say eatschmeat she says what did you say and for a minute icy winds are blowing. there has been hell breaking loose ever since mother woke me this morning by telling me that that was a letter from dartmouth that the dog was eating.when she came in an hour later and found me reading the letter for the fifth time she began to be curious and asked me all sorts of questions about you. yes, she got it all. consequently there was a rather nice scene, me coming off decidedly the worse, since mother quite unfairly enlisted alta's assistance and alta went and made a cake and i like cake. mother says, in effect: go on and be a damn fool but don't tell your father. i had to cry rather loudly though. which means that you are going to meet a good deal more opposition than i had counted on. i think mother was mad because she took your long distance call the other day and the big shot was expecting an important business call and he was quite excited when the operator told him that the party at the other end of the line wasn't going to pay. yes, and mother says to tell you that any more letters arriving with postage due and she will either steam the letters open since they belong to her since she practically bought them or she will start taking the postage out of my allowance.
however all in all she is being rather sweet, and more intelligent than i gave her credit for, since she absolutely refuses to forbid me to see you which means that now i have no reason to be romantically clandestine. disappointing when i'd already picked out a hollow oak tree. which brings me to the point: if you love me so damn m...
