Sounds like an interesting collection.
THE LETTERS OF SHIRLEY JACKSON
Edited by Laurence Jackson Hyman in consultation with Bernice M. Murphy
The two most revealing documents in this hefty collection of unpublished letters written by the novelist Shirley Jackson were never sent. One was addressed to her mother, and the other to her husband, Stanley Edgar Hyman. Both were written not long before Jackson died in her sleep in 1965, at the age of 48. A third important but technically unsent letter included in this volume wouldn’t have even required postage: Jackson wrote it to herself, possibly sometime in 1963. “One world is writing and one is not,” she observed, “and from the one which is not, it is not possible to understand the one which is.”
Many writers feel that the self who writes exists in a partially unknowable state, separate from the self who goes about her worldly business, talking with friends and colleagues, cooking dinner, ferrying her children around. With Jackson, the division seems especially vivid, and also tripartite, an impression that this collection, edited by her son Laurence Jackson Hyman, solidifies. She had not one but two authorial identities, and they appeared to be polar opposites. Early in her career, Jackson wrote linked, semi-fictionalized accounts of raising her four rambunctious children in the small town of North Bennington, Vt., and sold them for tidy sums to women’s magazines. The publication of these genuinely delightful, humorous pieces in a 1953 collection, “Life Among the Savages,” proved equally successful. Another book, “Raising Demons,” followed in 1957, and the income Jackson earned from her pen often outpaced Hyman’s as a staff writer for The New Yorker and a professor at Bennington College.
At the same time Jackson also regularly published more sinister, enigmatic short fiction in general-interest magazines; her most famous story, “The Lottery,” appeared in The New Yorker in 1948 and generated more reader mail than any work of fiction the magazine had ever published. Also set in a small town much like North Bennington, “The Lottery” has, in print and dramatic form, transfixed and perplexed generations of readers with its depiction of a banal rural morning that segues into ritual human sacrifice. In contrast to the bemused mom she wrote about for the women’s magazines, presiding over a house packed with kids, cats, friends and chaos, the rest of Jackson’s fictional heroines tend to be fragile, isolated girls on the brink of unraveling. Her 1954 novel, “The Bird’s Nest,” features a young woman with dissociative identity disorder, the narration including the points of view of her alternate personalities. Any hope that Jackson’s private writing might convey a more unified sense of self seems quixotic. According to her
biographer, Ruth Franklin, even as a teenager Jackson “kept multiple diaries simultaneously, each with a different purpose.” ...
In researching her biography, Franklin discovered a cache of letters Jackson wrote to a fan named Jeanne Beatty, whose taste in books she shared. The two never met. It’s only in reading these letters, written between 1959 and 1963, that it becomes evident how lonely Jackson was. Her confessions and enthusiasms come gushing forth as if she were a teenager who had finally, finally found a best friend. She explains to Jeanne her struggles to craft a “sustained taut style full of images and all kinds of double meanings.” At times, these letters relax into something like stream of consciousness, her habitual lowercase prose flowing from household noises to Jackson’s protean plans for “We Have Always Lived in the Castle”: “oo let us make a orchestra cries david you bang on the wastebasket. her name is jenny. she lives with her sister constance in a big old brown house saturated with family memories and her husband lives there too; they have been married for seven years and her sister constance still calls him mr harrap. they are going to kill him because he is a boor i think.” ...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/11/...son-hyman-the-letters-of-shirley-jackson.html
