Children of the Night: Shirley Jackson’s Domestic Female Gothic

Abstract

Shirley Jackson was one of the most popular writers working in America from the 1940s to the 1960s. During her lifetime (she died in 1965 at the age of 48) she published six novels, a collection of short stories, two books of non-fiction focusing on her domestic life, and three books for children. Although it was not her first tale in print her literary career was effectively launched by the publication of her short story ‘The Lottery’ in The New Yorker in June 1948 which dealt with the inner tensions and murderously arbitrary rules of what otherwise appeared to be a ‘civilised’ community, and caused some considerable controversy at the time. Her work is often either explicitly Gothic or contains a strong interest in the sinister. It is, however, only since the 1990s that critical interest in her work has flourished.