Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life

”… lively and authoritative new biography.” – The Economist
“This new biography… could not be more welcome or timely… Her [Ruth Franklin’s] critical grasp of Jackson’s oeuvre is superlative and you do not doubt a word she says: this is most definitely an exhaustive biography.” – Julie Myerson - The Spectator
“Franklin has gained access to a trove of new material including a fascinating correspondence between Jackson and a housewife fan in the early 1960s. Our sense of there being “two Shirleys” is not encouraged by the author, who makes a convincing case for seeing the two personas instead as “profoundly interconnected”.” – The Times Literary Supplement
“Franklin’s masterful biography, deeply researched and warmly sympathetic to its subject, paints a different picture, successfully marrying the various elements of Jackson’s personality – writer and homemaker, gifted literary author and popular mummy-blogger memoirist.” – Literary Review
”… sympathetic and fair-minded biography…” – The Guardian
“Franklin… gives equal weight to Jackson’s life and work in this groundbreaking new biography.” – Jane Ciabattari, The 10 Best Books of 2016 - BBC Culture
”…Ruth Franklin skilfully and with great verve and readability paints a portrait of a woman with many faces in this slick and stylish biography.” – The Mail on Sunday
“Ruth Franklin’s Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life is a richly satisfying biography: capacious, incisive, and full of surprising insights into the legacy of this “Virginia Werewolf among the séance-fiction writers” (as a short-sighted mid-century writer once dubbed her).” – Kate Bolick, Our Favourite Books of 2016 - The Irish Times
”… enjoyable biography…” – Dan Jones - The Times
“In her biography…Ruth Franklin plays down the broomstick tag and skilfully unpicks the threads of Jackson’s life and works.” – The Arts Desk
”… gloriously comprehensive book.” – SciFi Now
”… a wonderful, intriguing, warmhearted biography of the author of The Lottery. Franklin, like her subject, is just so darned readable…” – The Bookseller
“This is a skilled and deeply researched portrait of a curious woman and accomplished writer who retains the power to torment and unsettle readers…” – The Times
“Franklin’s biography looks at the inner darkness that fuelled a unique literary talent.” – The Telegraph
“For many readers, Jackson is the best of all horror writers, a master of tension and unravelling sanity. In the biography Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life, Ruth Franklin unravels some of the myths that surrounded the writer and also shows us a picture of a life that in some ways contains many of the things Jackson was writing about. Plagued with a fear of the outside world and an obsessive, panicked need to write, Jackson at times appears as one of her own characters – paranoid, compulsive, afraid.” – Daisy Johnson, Further Reading: Horror Books - The Guardian

Ruth Franklin is a book critic and frequent contributor to The New Yorker, Harper’s, and many other publications. A recipient of a New York Public Library Cullman Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship, she lives in Brooklyn, New York.

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