By Francis Booth | On May 14, 2021 | Updated June 17, 2023 | Comments (0)
The Road Through the Wall was Shirley Jackson’s first novel (1948). That was also the year when her short story, “The Lottery,” was published, making her instantly famous (as well as infamous). This plot summary and analysis of The Road Through the Wall focuses on its young heroine, Harriet Merriam.
Jackson claimed that the novel was loosely based on her childhood growing up in a well-to-do neighborhood in California. Admitting that this book was somewhat of a revenge novel, she asserted that a first novel’s purpose, after all, was to get back one’s parents.
Excerpted from Girls in Bloom: Coming of Age in the Mid-20th Century Woman’s Novel by Francis Booth, reprinted by permission.
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By Francis Booth | On May 6, 2021 | Updated January 7, 2024 | Comments (4)
This analysis of We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962), Shirley Jackson’s last novel, has a special emphasis on Mary Katherine (Merricat), the younger of the Blackwood sisters central to the story.
Excerpted from Girls in Bloom: Coming of Age in the Mid 20th Century Woman’s Novel by Francis Booth, reprinted by permission.
In Shirley Jackson’s The Sundial and The Haunting of Hill House, she used an old house as a brooding, malign presence in the novel, almost a character in its own right. She did the same, though in a completely different way, in We Have Always Lived in the Castle, her last completed novel. Read More→
By Francis Booth | On April 23, 2021 | Updated December 20, 2023 | Comments (2)
This look at the coming of age of Allison MacKenzie, a central character in Peyton Place, the controversial 1956 novel by Grace Metalious, is excerpted from Girls in Bloom: Coming of Age in the Mid-20th Century Woman’s Novel by Francis Booth, reprinted by permission.
At right, Diane Varsi as Allison MacKenzie in the 1957 film adaptation of Peyton Place.
Peyton Place is set in a small New England town where everyone knows everyone’s business. The story actually takes place in the late 1930s, contrary to popular belief that it’s set in the 1950s. The book’s themes were more than the censors and many critics were prepared to accept. Read More→
By Francis Booth | On March 31, 2021 | Updated April 23, 2023 | Comments (3)
This analysis of Hangsaman, Shirley Jackson’s chilling and thought-provoking 1951 novel, is excerpted from Girls in Bloom: Coming of Age in the Mid-20th Century Woman’s Novel by Francis Booth, reprinted by permission.
In a 1956 book called Sex Variant Women in Literature, the academic critic, Jeanette H. Foster referred to Hangsaman as “an eerie novel about lesbians.’ This is a bizarre reading of the novel and Shirley Jackson was incensed. Her biographer, Judy Oppenheimer, quoted her as saying:
“I happen to know what Hangsaman is about. I wrote it. And dammit it is about what I say it is about and not some dirty old lady at Oxford. Because (let me whisper) I don’t really know anything about stuff like that. And I don’t want to know… I am writing about ambivalence but it is an ambivalence of the spirit or the mind, not the sex. My poor devils have enough to contend with without being sex deviates along with being moral and romantic deviates.” Read More→
By Francis Booth | On March 23, 2021 | Updated April 19, 2025 | Comments (0)
Odd Girl Out by Ann Bannon (the pseudonym of Ann Weldy), was one of several hugely influential lesbian pulp novels of the 1950s. This appreciation and analysis is excerpted from Girls in Bloom: Coming of Age in the Mid-20th Century Woman’s Novel by Francis Booth, reprinted by permission.
In the introduction to her anthology Lesbian Pulp Fiction, the author Katherine V. Forrest remembers how a book she found in a bookshop in Detroit in 1957 changed not only her writing but her life: Read More→
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