We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson

We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson is a short, fiction book, which I bought from a charity shop because it was a Penguin Modern Classic. The book is dark and interesting and strange. Mary Katharine or Merricat, 18, lives with her older sister Constance and her Uncle Julian. Constance was believed to be the one who killed the rest of the family, but she was acquitted. Charles arrives and that annoys Merricat. The story is narrated by Merricat.

I don’t want to talk too much about the book to avoid giving out spoilers. I will say thought that I liked the characters and the story, despite it being so unusual and dark. As it is a classic I imagine it is easy to find at the library, so do check it out if you are intrigued about the blurb. The ending was unexpected and, as the rest of the book, strange. I’ve been using the word strange quite a few times because I feel that is the perfect way to describe the storyline.

At the end it has an essay, but I highly recommend skipping that. I didn’t find anything of value in it. That was the only downside of this edition.

We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson

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My rating: 5/5 Stars
Would I recommend it: yes
Published by: Penguin Books
Year it was published: 2009 (first published in 1962)
Format: Paperback
Genre(s): Fiction
Pages: 158

About the author: Shirley Jackson was an American author. She was a popular writer in her time, and her work has received increasing attention from literary critics in recent years.
She is best known for her dystopian short story, “The Lottery” (1948), which suggests there is a deeply unsettling underside to bucolic, small town America. The literary critic Stanley Edgar Hyman wrote that “she consistently refused to be interviewed, to explain or promote her work in any fashion, or to take public stands and be the pundit of the Sunday supplements. She believed that her books would speak for her clearly enough over the years.” Hyman insisted the darker aspects of Jackson’s works were not, as some critics claimed, the product of “personal, even neurotic, fantasies”, but that Jackson intended, as “a sensitive and faithful anatomy of our times, fitting symbols for our distressing world of the concentration camp and the Bomb”, to mirror humanity’s Cold War-era fears. Jackson may even have taken pleasure in the subversive impact of her work, as revealed by Hyman’s statement that she “was always proud that the Union of South Africa banned The Lottery’, and she felt that they at least understood the story”.
In 1965, Jackson died of heart failure in her sleep, at her home in North Bennington Vermont, at the age of 48.
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