But even then, there is no physical description of Theodora-there's just a voice: "I'm Theodora." Is this all in Eleanor's head? Wow. Dudley, but Eleanor is still not described as seeing anyone else until Theodora introduces herself. It's a disorienting moment, and then Eleanor sees Mrs. To whom? Is there anyone really? Maybe not! Maybe Eleanor is mad. Eleanor is at the top of the stairs, looking down, and she begins talking before you realize there's anyone else there. The moment when Eleanor first meets Theodora is so brilliantly done. Here is this strong presence who threatens to swallow her up, and in a way, when she walks in, a sort of Gothic romance is born. She's afraid of Hill House in the same way she'd be afraid of a lover. It's presented as being alive, as being almost a lover who "enshadows" Eleanor when she walks up those steps, and in that description you get not only a sense of the house itself, but a sense of Eleanor, of her loneliness and perhaps even madness. And yet.we somehow know it intimately nonetheless. I find it fascinating that Jackson describes the house for nearly two pages without ever physically describing it, other than to say it's "enormous and dark" and has steps leading up to a veranda. I'd forgotten just what a genius description of the Hill House we're treated to when Eleanor first sees it. The interaction in the diner is classic Shirley Jackson-capturing the suspicion and unease and boredom of small town life. Again, it takes a few pages to get there, but it allows for wonderful scenes where her imagination takes flight or where she interacts, awkwardly, with the townsfolk in the nearest small town. Then we follow Eleanor, the main character, as she takes the car she shares with her sister and drives to Hill House. A contemporary editor might have said: "Cut this out and get right to the story," but to me these opening pages are wonderful little character studies. I love the fact that the opening pages essentially replicate the clinical nature of the premise: here's the chief investigator, here are the three other characters, all described at a clinical remove before we get into the "story" itself. The premise is that of a science experiment-an academic exercise to test the reality of house-haunting. I'm falling in love with this book all over again as I re-read it. In 1965, Jackson died of heart failure in her sleep, at her home in North Bennington Vermont, at the age of 48. 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". 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.
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Jackson's husband, the literary critic Stanley Edgar Hyman, wrote in his preface to a posthumous anthology of her work 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. In her critical biography of Shirley Jackson, Lenemaja Friedman notes that when Shirley Jackson's story "The Lottery" was published in the June 28, 1948, issue of The New Yorker, it received a response that "no New Yorker story had ever received." Hundreds of letters poured in that were characterized by, as Jackson put it, "bewilderment, speculation and old-fashioned abuse." She is best known for her dystopian short story, "The Lottery" (1948), which suggests there is a deeply unsettling underside to bucolic, smalltown America. She has influenced such writers as Stephen King, Nigel Kneale, and Richard Matheson. A popular writer in her time, her work has received increasing attention from literary critics in recent years. Shirley Jackson was an influential American author.