We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson

‘I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead.’

Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle

In her last and greatest work, Shirley Jackson invites us into the unsettling and at times chillingly comic world of eighteen-year-old Mary Katherine Blackwood (Merricat). An acknowledged master of the Gothic genre, Jackson puts her own, unique twist on the traditional trope of women trapped in a lonely, decaying house. There, Merricat thrives on magical thinking, burying curios to resist the threat of change, while Constance piles up jams and pickles like gems in a treasury, fending off the harshness of the coming winter with a glut of preserves. The women live socially isolated lives with Uncle Julian as their sole male companion. The fragile balance of this apparent pastoral idyll is unbalanced by the arrival of Cousin Charles. Naïve to the shadow which underpins the sisters’ enforced isolation, Charles sets in motion a chain of events which ends with deadly consequences. 

Intriguing and enchanting, the novel explores what lies below the thin veneer of our apparent civilisation.

JOINING DETAILS:

• Facilitated by Nikki Fraunhofer
• We will be using the Penguin Modern Classics edition of We Have Always Lived in the Castle (ISBN-13: ‎ 978-0141191454, 176 pages, including an afterword by Joyce Carol Oates).
• Three two-hour meetings: Thursdays 17.00-19.00 (UK), 29 August, 5 & 12 September 2024
• £105 for three session study (please see the note on the booking form below if you would like to know more about support which may be available to help with costs).