Despite the backlash, it became one of the most significant short stories of its time, translated into over a dozen languages and adapted for radio, television, and the stage. It generated the most mail in the history of magazine, with thousands of readers sending letters in droves to express their anger and confusion about the story’s disturbing ending, where a woman is stoned to death by her neighbors.
In 1948, Jackson published “The Lottery” in The New Yorker. Those essays later became what Jackson called “domestic memoirs,” titled Life Among the Savages and Raising Demons. She poured those feelings into a series of comic essays about her hectic life and her cheeky children, which she sold to women’s magazines like Mademoiselle, Good Housekeeping, Woman’s Day, and Ladies’ Home Journal. In 1940, Jackson and Hyman married, traveling the East Coast before settling in North Bennington, Vermont, where Hyman had been hired as an instructor at Bennington College.Īlthough Jackson largely enjoyed her role as a homemaker and mother, she turned to the page to express ambivalence about the mind-numbing drudgery of housework, as well as the propensity of domestic life to subsume a woman’s identity. It was through college journalism that Jackson encountered Hyman, who read one of her stories in the campus newspaper and vowed to marry the writer, sight unseen.
As a young adult, she studied journalism at Syracuse University, where she began publishing her stories in the campus literary magazine.
In 1916, Jackson was born in an affluent suburb of San Francisco, where she struggled to fit in with other children and spent much of her time writing. Though Fred and Rose may be fictional, what they observe during their stay are the very real tensions present in Jackson and Hyman’s marriage, as well as the visceral reality of Jackson’s demons.
Fred is an acolyte of Jackson’s husband, the literary critic and Bennington College professor Stanley Edgar Hyman, while Rose becomes something of an amanuensis to Jackson as she writes what will become Hangsaman, her acclaimed 1951 novel. Adapted from Shirley: A Novel, by Susan Scarf Merrell, the film depicts Jackson near the end of her life, when a young graduate student and his pregnant wife (both fictional) come to stay in her bohemian Vermont home. Jackson has come back into the public eye as the enigmatic subject of Shirley, a sensational new film from indie director Josephine Decker, which stars Elisabeth Moss as the reclusive writer.
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