We have always lived in the castle

135 Pages·2006·0.53 MB·English

by  Jackson

Table of Contents

WE HAVE ALWAYS LIVED IN THE CASTLE
Title Page
Copyright Page
Introduction
Dedication

Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
WE HAVE ALWAYS LIVED IN THE CASTLE
SHIRLEY JACKSON was born in San Francisco in 1916. She first received
wide critical acclaim for her short story “The Lottery,” which was published in
1949. Her novels—which include The Sundial, The Bird’s Nest, Hangsaman,
The Road through the Wall, and The Haunting of Hill House (Penguin), in
addition to We Have Always Lived in the Castle (Penguin)—are characterized by
her use of realistic settings for tales that often involve elements of horror and the
occult. Raising Demons and Life among the Savages (Penguin) are her two
works of nonfiction. She died in 1965. Come Along With Me (Penguin) is a
collection of stories, lectures, and part of the novel she was working on when she
died in 1965.

JONATHAN LETHEM is the author of Motherless Brooklyn, which won the
National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, as well as the novels The
Fortress of Solitude; Gun, with Occasional Music; As She Climbed Across the
Table; Girl in Landscape ; and Amnesia Moon. He has also published stories
(Men and Cartoons) and essays (The Disappointment Artist).
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First published in the United States of America by The Viking Press 1962
Published in a Viking Compass edition 1970
Published in Penguin Books 1976
This edition with an introduction by Jonathan Lethem published 2006

Copyright © Shirley Jackson, 1962
Copyright renewed Barry Hyman, Sarah Webster, and Joanne Schnurer, 1990
Introduction copyright © Jonathan Lethem, 2006
All rights reserved
Publisher’s Note
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s
imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business
establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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Introduction
Life in Shirley Jackson’s (Out)Castle
Ten and twenty years ago I used to play a minor parlor trick; I wonder if it
would still work. When asked my favorite writer, I’d say “Shirley Jackson,”
counting on most questioners to say they’d never heard of her. At that I’d reply,
with as much smugness as I could muster: “You’ve read her.” When my
interlocutor expressed skepticism, I’d describe “The Lottery”—still the most
widely anthologized American short story of all time, I’d bet, and certainly the
most controversial, and censored, story ever to debut in The New Yorker—
counting seconds to the inevitable widening of my victim’s eyes: they’d not only
read it, they could never forget it. I’d then happily take credit as a mind reader,
though the trick was too easy by far. I don’t think it ever failed.
Jackson is one of American fiction’s impossible presences, too material to be
called a phantom in literature’s house, too in-print to be “rediscovered,” yet
hidden in plain sight. She’s both perpetually underrated and persistently
mischaracterized as a writer of upscale horror, when in truth a slim minority of
her works had any element of the supernatural (Henry James wrote more ghost
stories). While celebrated by reviewers throughout her career, she wasn’t
welcomed into any canon or school; she’s been no major critic’s fetish. Sterling
in her craft, Jackson is prized by the writers who read her, yet it would be self-
congratulatory to claim her as a writer’s writer. Rather, Shirley Jackson has
thrived, at publication and since, as a reader’s writer. Her most famous works
—“The Lottery” and The Haunting of Hill House—are more famous than her
name, and have sunk into cultural memory as timeless artifacts, seeming older
than they are, with the resonance of myth or archetype. The same aura of
folkloric familiarity attaches to less-celebrated writing: the stories “Charles” and
“One Ordinary Day, With Peanuts” (you’ve read one of these two tales, though
you may not know it), and her last novel, We Have Always Lived in the Castle.
Though she teased at explanations of sorcery in both her life and in her art (an
early dust-flap biography called her “a practicing amateur witch,” and she seems
never to have shaken the effects of this debatable publicity strategy), Jackson’s
great subject was precisely the opposite of paranormality. The relentless,
undeniable core of her writing—her six completed novels and the twenty-odd