We Have Always Lived in the Castle

"This is a masterpiece in atmosphere and Gothic empathy. By that I mean that the Gothic draws out your love for the characters who in the abstract shouldn’t have your sympathy at all. It’s narrated by Merricat Blackwood. The Blackwoods live in this tumbledown house in large but dilapidated grounds. Merricat does strange magic spells, the family are ostracised by the villagers. They’re this self-contained, strange little unit. It’s absolutely rich with all this suppressed female sexuality, and the enormous power of a young woman: a young teenage woman poised between childhood—the odd practices she still has and her love for her cat and so on—and the power of the adulthood she’s about to enter. At all times you’re aware that a great crime has been committed, a great tragedy. And you gradually find out where that lies and where it comes from. By then, your emotions and sympathies are engaged to such an extent that you’re forced into being complicit. That’s what I find exciting about it. It challenges your idea about what wickedness is and who you can sympathise with. It’s incredibly clever. Shirley Jackson was an absolute master of playing with the reader and poking and teasing them, and pushing them further and further. She’s been very clever. She has a habit of being very subversive about small-town America as a microcosm of the whole country. She’s famous for “The Lottery” , a short story, which, when it was published in The New Yorker , received more complaints than any other short story they’d published before. In it, she depicts a small, modern, ordinary American town where everybody knows each other and it turns about as dark as a short story can get. What she’s saying in all her fiction is don’t think you are civilised or safe, with your refrigerator and your white picket fence, and knowing the next door neighbour but one, and walking your dog in the morning, because underneath this veneer of healthy teeth and orange juice for breakfast, we’re all kind of savage, and there’s a magic out there, and you could turn on each other at the drop of a hat. That’s really radical. That’s one of the reasons I found We’ve Always Lived in the Castle so exciting. So much of the Gothic fiction I had read had been set in places we conventionally think of as Gothic: the Yorkshire Moors, Melmoth travels from rural Ireland to Spain, Ann Radcliffe’s novels are set in Italy and the Alps. It’s exciting when you pluck the Gothic from those sublime mountain backdrops and deep labyrinths underneath castles or abbeys and drop all of that feeling, that sensation, those transgressions, that terror, into something ordinary and workaday. This is why Fludd and the work of Hilary Mantel is so important, because she does for suburban England what Shirley Jackson did for small-town America. If you’re English and more familiar with English towns, that’s even more thrilling."

"It’s my favourite too. Although if you ask me tomorrow, I’ll say The Haunting of Hill House . But this is a novel about two young women, again, in a mansion house: one that is somewhat haunted, but by more recent history—what they have done. It’s about a family who’ve been poisoned at the dinner table, via a bowl of sugar. I think there’s something happening there with girlhood and sweetness. And the community has ostracised them, as you say, and pushed them into this position of almost being the witches in the house on the hill. They’re feared and revered and generally left alone. Like a lot of Jackson’s work, it’s about small communities in 20th century America. It’s about a distrust of women. It follows a long literary tradition of women being accused of poisoning—this being the only disposal in a woman’s power in an otherwise oppressive society. And it’s about strange sisters. So you can see shades of Alice Hoffman’s Practical Magic, though the supernatural in it isn’t as explicit, in fact you could argue there’s nothing supernatural in We Have Always Lived in the Castle at all. Instead it’s about a kind of strangeness. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . It has this very odd protagonist, Merricat, who is a sort of witch, she enacts rituals and spells, but whether they’re effective or not it’s left up to you as the reader. But the fact that she’s doing them is of interest. It’s a text that has been read as queer, because of the relationship between those two sisters who become a kind of quasi husband and wife, with the uncle as their infant. And it has great fun with ideas of invasion as well. They have this cousin that returns to claim the family fortune, and it’s all about Merricat pushing him away and preserving this kind of feminist Eden of her and her sister together. Again, it does a lot of complicated things in a really short form. I think it’s a shame that it’s not as well-known as The Haunting of Hill House. But maybe The Haunting of Hill House is more familiar, as a haunted house story, and Castle is a bit too out there. Jackson centres women in these narratives, and often quite specifically young women at the transition point—post-adolescence and the independence that brings, but pre-marriage. So much gothic and horror literature is about that precipice of the child becoming a woman, in adolescence. Jackson situates it at a slightly different point—post-college, or pre-marriage—which I think is interesting in terms of the changing idea of women’s freedom in mid 20th century America, as birth control is being introduced and women are accessing higher education in ways they’ve never been able to before. Lots of her short stories, too, have these young, unmarried women at their centre—and that’s something loaded with potentiality. They’re not mothers, they’re not wives, they’re no longer children or really daughters. What do you do with those women? It reminds me of a census I saw of, from the 1850s, that described something like 600,000 women who were unmarried and childless; the newspapers called them ‘redundant women’ , and considered them a great threat to society. Because: what are they up to? I think Jackson is concerned with the idea that relationships between women, conversations between women, have been historically obscured—have gone on in secret in domestic spaces, and haven’t had a public stage. There’s something potentially quite scary in that—it’s where the modern idea of the coven comes from."

"Yes, Shirley Jackson is relatively recent for me. Most people direct you to The Haunting of Hill House , which is her ghost story. I did think that was brilliant. I raced through it, loved it, admired it, but it did not get under my skin in the same way as We Have Always Lived in the Castle. It has a barely contained, unhinged feel to it that I find completely gripping. It’s about two sisters who are left in a large house after their entire family dies from arsenic poisoning. There’s Uncle Julian as well, who is infirm in his wheelchair. They’re in this cut off unit. The villagers are all really hostile because they think that Constance, the elder sister, is the murderer—even though she’s been tried and acquitted of the crime. So they’re in this slightly unhinged bubble and Merricat, the younger girl, has lots of superstitions and rituals. They never talk about the grief they must feel for their parents, brother and uncle. You get this sense that there are all these terrible family secrets and tensions that have gone on before the book happens. I really love the way this becomes part of the book without ever being explored. Jackson never actually goes there. But, a bit like Ripley , you get this feeling of all the surrounding layers which make the story so unsettling and so plausible. And, of course, you know that the hostility that surrounds these sisters is going to breach the walls at some point. The tension builds so slowly and so brilliantly and you can’t put it down. They don’t feel like they’re happening now. You have a sense that this is happening at a different period. But the emotions and the feelings that these books elicit are universal. That’s why they’re so good. They are such archetypal fears and repulsions and desires that the fact that there’s an odd detail where you think, ‘My goodness that must have been in the 1960s’ doesn’t make it feel any less real. There’s been a new biography of her that has had some attention. That’s what got me thinking about her and realising that I’d never read her work, and going straight to her books and devouring them. She wrote some really excellent stories as well, and some non-fiction about her life. She died very young, at 48. She was quite troubled and had an interesting life."