We Have Always Lived in the Castle
— 1962 —
New York: Penguin Books, 2006; with an afterword by Jonathan Lethem; 146 pages
FIRST LINES
My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet,I and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead.
PLOT SUMMARY
With that intriguing introduction, we meet the first of two sisters, Mary Katherine, called Merricat but assuredly not a werewolf. Mary Katherine and her older sister, Constance, live with their wheelchair-bound uncle Julian as outcasts in their small village, presumably but not specifically in New England. This trio lives reclusively, cut off from almost all contact with neighbors and the townspeople. The suspicious villagers believe the sisters harbor a secret about a deadly event that took place years earlier in the Blackwood house. That occurrence is why, as Merricat reveals in this opening, “Everyone else in my family is dead.”
One day, an estranged cousin named Charles turns up. Somewhat surprisingly, Constance welcomes him into the household. But Merricat is deeply suspicious of Charles and his motives. Why has he come and moved into her dead father’s room? She uses all her powers, real and imagined, to be rid of him, in this harrowing gothic tale of psychological suspense.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: SHIRLEY JACKSON
There is a good chance that you know Shirley Jackson’s name because of her most famous piece of writing. Her short story “The Lottery” was published in the New Yorker in 1948 and has since become required reading for many American students. The plot, in case you don’t know it, involves a small town in which a member of the community is chosen by lot in a yearly ritual. What happens to the chosen one is not revealed until the end—and no spoilers here.
Suffice it to say that the reaction from readers to the story’s initial appearance included a cascade of hate mail and many cancelled subscriptions. According to Jackson’s biographer Ruth Franklin, it was at the time “the most mail the magazine had ever received in response to a work of fiction.”
Jackson was born in San Francisco on December 4, 1916, and grew up an outsider. She was a bookish, somewhat overweight teenager, who disappointed her hectoring mother; according to one biographer, Jackson’s mother told her she was the product of a failed abortion.
After her family moved to New York, Jackson made her way to Syracuse University. A journalism student, Jackson also worked on the school’s literary magazine, where she met her future husband, Stanley Edgar Hyman, later a prominent literary critic. They married in 1940, and Hyman, a Jewish Brooklynite, joined the faculty at Bennington College. The couple settled in North Bennington, Vermont, where Shirley would give birth to four children. She found the insular small town repressive, anti-intellectual, and anti-Semitic. The hostility she felt would fuel “The Lottery” and We Have Always Lived in the Castle.
In 1948, the same year that “The Lottery” appeared in the New Yorker, Jackson published a first novel, a semiautobiographical account of growing up in California called The Road Through the Wall with characteristic gothic elements. A second novel, Hangsaman (1951), was based on the actual disappearance—still unsolved—of a Bennington College student. Two more novels, The Bird’s Nest (1954), about a woman with multiple personalities, and The Sundial (1958), about a group who believe that they will survive the end of the world, cemented her place as a serious writer of psychological stories.
But in 1959, The Haunting of Hill House, her fifth novel, reached new heights. Mixing the psychological and the supernatural, it has been cited as one of the most influential horror stories of the twentieth century. It became the source of two film versions, both called The Haunting, and the inspiration for a 2018 Netflix anthology series. It was followed in 1962 by We Have Always Lived in the Castle, which reached even greater critical success, with Time calling it one of the best novels of the year.
By then, Jackson was in poor health. A smoker, she was asthmatic and overweight. Plagued by her husband’s open infidelities, often with Bennington students, she began drinking and used both barbiturates and amphetamines, commonly prescribed at the time. Though her mental health improved with therapy, Shirley Jackson died in her sleep in her North Bennington home in August 1965. She was forty-eight years old.
WHY YOU SHOULD READ IT
This was, for me, a one-sitting read. Yes, it is that compelling a story. As the mystery of the deaths of the Blackwell family slowly unravels, the arrival of Charles upsets the carefully ordered and delicate balance that Constance has created in the house.
Disturbing yet comic, the novel gathers momentum and intensity, working toward a conflagration that threatens the Blackwood women’s strange but perfectly arranged lives.
Writing in The Atlantic in 2016, columnist Heather Havrilesky commented:
Reading her work today sometimes feels like discovering a detailed prophecy not just of rape culture but of the vitriolic thugs who seem to rule the internet and have somehow invaded politics lately…. Jackson unveiled the brutality and contempt that lurk beneath the surface of neighborly human interactions.
WHAT TO READ NEXT
If you never read “The Lottery,” do so right away. If you read it long ago in school, reread it. Widely anthologized, it is one of the most famous American short stories of the twentieth century. The story begins on a bucolic summer day in a New England village. Everything seems perfect: the children are out of school and the landscape has turned green. Jackson abruptly turns this idyllic scene into an examination of human superstition and cruelty.
In 1988, Shirley Jackson’s biographer wrote:
“The Lottery” came out in the June 26, 1948, issue of The New Yorker, and its effect was instant and cataclysmic. Nothing in the magazine before or since would provoke such a huge outpouring of fury, horror, rage, disgust and intense fascination…. This story was incendiary; readers acted as if a bomb had blown up in their faces, as indeed in a sense it had. Shirley struck a nerve in mid-20th-century America the way few writers have ever succeeded in doing, at any time.
Shirley Jackson was a genius practitioner of gothic horror, and The Haunting of Hill House is a masterpiece of the genre and still sets a standard for tales of spooky houses. But it is not a “comfort read.” Curl up in bed with it. But be sure to leave the lights on.
- I. I looked it up so you don’t have to. The Richard Plantagenet referred to was a reclusive bricklayer reputed to be the son of England’s Richard III.