A guest has come to tea dressed in black. She sits on a small, uncomfortable chair in a drawing room of rose brocade and Dresden figurines, beneath a portrait of a dead woman, and she holds a little rum cake on the edge of her saucer that she will not, under any circumstances, eat. Her companion, a local matron who calls on the Blackwood sisters every Friday out of a sense of duty, is urging the elder sister to come back into the world. Then the old uncle rolls in, freshly scrubbed and wearing his best tie, and offers the timid guest a tour of the dining room where the poisoning happened. She accepts. We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson contains several frightening scenes, but none sharper than this one, in which a woman who has been warned not to raise the subject cannot stop asking about it.
The Comedy Inside We Have Always Lived in the Castle
Those facts come out in that dining room, by the people who survived them. Six years earlier, arsenic was stirred into the heavy silver sugar bowl and sprinkled on the blackberries at a family dinner. Four Blackwoods died. Constance, the elder daughter, who cooked the meal and never took sugar, was tried and acquitted. Uncle Julian lived, but has needed a wheelchair ever since. The younger sister, Mary Katherine, called Merricat, was upstairs, sent to bed without supper. She narrates the book.
Julian is the novel’s great comic creation. He is writing the definitive account of the case, and he has been at it for years, shuffling his clippings and notes at a desk in the kitchen corner. He announces one morning that he will begin chapter forty-four, then decides instead to go back and revise chapter seventeen. His memory slides: he takes Constance for his dead wife, and a visitor for his dead brother. Every so often he stops in the middle of a sentence and asks whether it really happened, and Constance, every time, tells him gently that it did. These moments are where the comedy in We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson turns, without any change of tone, into grief.
Merricat’s own humour is colder. When a dinner guest she dislikes announces that he will take over her errands in the village, she recites, in an even voice, the three toxins in the death cap mushroom and how long each takes to act. Constance cannot stop laughing. The guest puts down his chicken. The scene is a fair test of a reader’s temperament: those who laugh will love the book, and those who wince are paying close attention.
Much of the pleasure lies in how little Merricat explains. She talks of a little house on the moon where everything is safe, of a winged horse that could carry her sister there, of days that turn good or bad according to omens only she can read. She is eighteen and sounds by turns twelve and eighty. Nobody tells the reader how to take her, and We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson depends on that uncertainty: each line she speaks can be heard as a child’s fancy or as something far less innocent, and Jackson declines to settle the question for anyone in a hurry.
The Preserves That Have Always Lived in the Castle
If Merricat is the voice of the house, Constance is its hands. The cellar holds jars of jam and pickle and fruit put up by every Blackwood woman back to the great-grandmothers, the labels faded almost to nothing, rows of maroon and amber and green that no one is allowed to open. Constance adds her own each summer and handles every vegetable as though it might bruise. In a novel built on a meal that killed most of the family, the endless cooking is both a comfort and a standing joke, and Jackson never quite says which.
The sisters’ world is held together by ritual. Merricat buries and nails up small objects around the grounds as charms, a private form of sympathetic magic that she trusts more than the fence. When a cousin named Charles arrives, a big, loud man with their dead father’s face, the rituals begin to fail. He fills the house with pipe smoke, talks constantly about money and the safe in the study, and starts suggesting to Constance that her life might be ordinary after all. We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson becomes, from that point, a contest for one woman’s attention, and the stakes are higher than any reader is told.
Persecution, murder, bereavement, mob cruelty and a narrator’s relish for revenge all run through the book, though Jackson handles every one of them without gore.
Where the Novel Stands Still
The reservations are minor, and most of them are choices. The final chapter slows to a set of routines and tableaux, deliberate and haunting, but light on event, and readers who want momentum to the last page will feel it idle. A turn in the village’s behaviour late on is reported rather than dramatised, which leaves its motives oddly blank. And Jackson’s refrains, the repeated endearments and the repeated checks of the lock, are hypnotic by design, but they can tip into monotony across a sitting. None of this dents the achievement of We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson; it simply marks the places where the spell is held a beat too long.
The Writer Behind the Blackwoods
Jackson, born in 1916, spent her adult life in North Bennington, Vermont, married to the critic Stanley Edgar Hyman and raising four children, a household she mined for two comic memoirs. That double life, domestic humourist by day and chronicler of small-town malice by night, is everywhere in this novel, which mixes a housekeeper’s eye for spoons and linen with a deep suspicion of neighbours.
It was the last novel she completed. By the early 1960s her health was failing, and anxiety kept her inside her own house for long stretches, a detail that gives Constance’s refusal to pass the garden a painful edge. Jackson acknowledged that the two sisters were loose portraits of her own daughters. She died in her sleep in 1965, aged only forty-eight, three years after the book appeared.
The novel’s afterlife has been busy. In 2010 Adam Bock and Todd Almond turned it into a musical at the Yale Repertory Theatre, and since 2007 the Shirley Jackson Awards, presented at Readercon, have honoured new work in psychological suspense, horror and the dark fantastic in her name.
Where It Leaves You
What lingers is not the crime but the household that grows around it: a cake left untouched, an uncle asking whether his own life happened, two sisters perfectly happy in a way no outsider can bear to see. We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson is short enough to read in an evening and strange enough to stay for years, and it deserves its place among the great American novels of its century.
Book groups will find no shortage of argument. Is Constance a victim of the village or a willing partner in her own captivity? How much does Merricat understand about herself? At what point, in We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson, does loyalty curdle into something darker? The novel answers none of these directly, which is exactly why it keeps being reread.
Readers drawn to a great house and the woman who rules it from the grave should go next to Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier. Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia brings the same rot-beneath-the-silver unease to a mountain mansion, and My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh offers a modern heroine who withdraws from the world, narrated with the same deadpan nerve.
The guest never touches her tea. In that house, nobody blames her.