Jackson’s husband, the critic Stanley Hyman, was troubled by obituaries that touted her as the ‘Virginia Werewolf’ of ‘séance-fiction’. Stephen King claimed that she wrote some of the best gothic tales of the 20th century, but second-wave feminists looked elsewhere for literary heroines. A major profile appeared in Time in 1962, the same year reviewers swooned over her last novel, We Have Always Lived in the Castle.Īfter Jackson’s death, her reputation dimmed. Jackson commanded top advances and invitations to the most prestigious writing conferences in America, while her works attracted Hollywood adaptations. Her fifth novel, The Haunting of Hill House, was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1960 and her short story ‘The Lottery’ was still the subject of debate and discussion, nearly twenty years after its publication in the New Yorker. When Shirley Jackson died in 1965 at the age of forty-eight, she was at the height of her literary power.
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