Shirley Jackson’s previous adolescent heroines, including Natalie, have all been a little bit unhinged, but of this novel she said that the heroine was “ really crazy.” Jackson’s older daughter Jannie told her mother’s biographer Judy Oppenheimer that the character of Merricat was based on her younger sister Sally and the character of the older sister Constance was based on herself.
We Have Always Lived in the Castle was well received at the time of its publication – the reception of Jackson’s books got warmer with each new one she published – and has been well-regarded ever since, generally being considered her best work.īut it is strange that little attention has been paid to the similarity in title and content to Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle both are narrated by odd, isolated adolescent women living in fortress-like solitude, though Smith’s Cassandra Mortmain is perhaps more like Jackson’s Natalie Waite of Hangsaman than Merricat Blackwood. With exquisite subtlety she then explores a dark world (“ The Lottery,” Hangsaman, The Haunting of Hill House) in which the usual brooding old houses, fetishes, poisons, poltergeists and psychotic females take on new dimensions of chill and dementia under her black-magical writing skill and infra-red feminine sensibility.” ( Time Magazine, 1962)Ī literary cousin of Natalie Waite & Cassandra Mortmain By day, amiably disguised as an embattled mother, she devotes her artful talents to the real-life confusions of the four small children ( Life Among the Savages, Raising Demons) in her Vermont household.īut when shadows fall and the little ones are safely tucked in, Author Jackson pulls down the deadly nightshade and is off. “Shirley Jackson is a kind of Virginia Werewoolf among the séance-fiction writers. She did the same, though in a completely different way, in We Have Always Lived in the Castle, her last completed novel.
In Shirley Jackson’s The Sundialand The Haunting of Hill House, she used an old house as a brooding, malign presence in the novel, almost a character in its own right. This analysis of We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962), Shirley Jackson’s last novel, has a special emphasis on Mary Katherine (Merricat), the younger of the Blackwood sisters central to the story.Įxcerpted from Girls in Bloom: Coming of Age in the Mid 20th Century Woman’s Novel by Francis Booth, reprinted by permission.
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