Shirley Jackson is a kind of Virginia Werewoolf among the seance-fiction writers. We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962) Expert as it is, The Haunting of Hill House is also haunted by too many other novels that owe their life to the father of psychoanalysis.” The difficulty is that the story is itself caught in a straitjacket fashioned by the lines of case history. Montague and the others insist on sending her home, and Eleanor’s life ends in one of those terrible scenes of mental horror that Author Jackson knows so well how to contrive. In The Lottery and Hangsaman, Shirley Jackson gave signs of being a writing thoroughbred, but The Bird’s Nest marks only scattered returns to her best form. Hangsaman is Shirley Jackson’s description, simple and terrifying, of a young girl sinking into schizophrenia.Ī racing axiom has it that a thoroughbred always returns to its best form. But the masquerade proves too much for Natalie. Her father had made up his mind that his imaginative child would be a writer Natalie tried to please him, even if it meant dressing up in a personality that wasn’t hers. The rope around the neck of 17-year old Natalie Waite was homemade.
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