A Coincidence of Shirleys.

I have to make mention of the American novelist, Shirley Jackson. I’ve just finished the first chapter of her novel The Haunting of Hill House, and so far I’m impressed. Her writing skills have all the qualities which the writing of the American novelist Dan Brown lack. They’re deeply insightful, imaginatively descriptive, and loaded with unflinching accuracy of observation. I’m lapping it up eagerly like a cat with a saucer of warm milk.

In the first chapter we sit with the character of the repressed and insecure Eleanor as she drives the 120 miles from her uncomfortable home to the eponymous house where she hopes to enter a more meaningful and sympathetic world. We listen to her inner conversations with herself as much as we listen to her verbal and curiously oddball conversations with the two strangers she meets along the way. And through her brief actions and extended imagination we learn all that’s worth knowing about poor Eleanor. The surface plot is so perfunctory as to be almost non-existent; the power is in the personality and what it says about one variation on the human condition. A lot of well known writers could learn a lot from one chapter of Shirley Jackson.

The coincidence is contained within the name. Regular readers will know of the high regard in which I hold the English novelist, Charlotte Brontë, and her novel Shirley. I wonder whether Jackson knew that Shirley was almost exclusively a male name until Charlotte’s novel was published in 1847. I imagine she probably did.