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Ruth Franklin, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life (New York: Liveright, 2016)
Despite enjoying critical success in the 1950s and '60s, Shirley Jackson's works lay nearly forgotten for several decades after her sudden death in 1965. Her husband, Stanley Edgar Hyman, published some of her works posthumously in 1966 and 1968, but his untimely death in 1970 ended his endeavours to guarantee her literary legacy. The Hyman family carefully packed the couple's papers carefully away in boxes, which were later donated to the Library of Congress. For the next three decades, Jackson's most popular story, 'The Lottery' (1948), remained her strongest link to a reading public. Only two of her later novels, The Haunting of Hill House (1959) and We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962), stayed consistently on bookstore shelves. For those who became interested in Jackson's writing, the only places to go were libraries, used bookstores, and the archives of the Manuscript Division at the Library of Congress.
In contrast to that relative neglect, the 2000s saw her works finally recognised as vital to modern gothic canon, especially by scholars of female gothic and suburban gothic. Since the publication of Bernice M. Murphy's collection, Shirley Jackson: Essays on the Literary Legacy (2005), something of a resurgence in scholarly interest has been taking place. Many of the essays contain research conducted in the Jackson archive at the Library of Congress. Even more beneficially, previously unpublished material has been released from the archive, in the form of a new collection of short stories and essays, Let Me Tell You (2015). Coinciding with these, new scholarly material has also begun to emerge, such as Melanie R. Anderson and Lisa Kröger's Shirley Jackson, Influences and Confluences (2016).
Concurrent with the appearance of research, fiction writers who claim the gothic as either their favoured genre or as an inspiring influence, such as Neil Gaiman, Joyce Carol Oates, and Stephen King, have sung Jackson's praises in various print and social media. Oates's commentary on Jackson's works is both silently and outspokenly supportive of the value of Jackson's writing: Oates edited the Library of Congress publication Shirley Jackson: Novels and Stories (2010), and in 2016, wrote an article entitled 'Shirley Jackson in Love and Death' for the New York...