Shirley Hardie Jackson was born into an upper middle-class family on December 14, 1919 in San Francisco, California. Her father, Leslie Hardie Jackson was a British born Lithograph company executive. Shirley’s mother, Geraldine Bugbee Jackson was a descendant from a family of very well known architects. (Alessio 114). Just two years after she was born her parents had another child named Barry. When Shirley was six and her brother was four, the Jackson family moved from San Francisco to a suburban town 30 mil

At this time in Shirley’s life everything started to slow down. Shirley started to attend her son’s Little League games, was apart of the Parent–Teacher Association and worked on fundraising activities for the group. (Hall 34) When her daughters were in high school, Shirley volunteered to teach creative writing courses at the school. She kept herself busy by also by giving lectures at writing conferences, and sometimes in the summer when she had no speaking engagements, Shirley enjoyed going to the Saratoga Race Track. (Hall 35) The Hyman’s would host dinner parties that would have poets, critics, notable novelists, musicians, educators, and other professional men and women.

Shirley suffered emotional and physical problems. She had anxiety, claustrophobia, agoraphobia, and she was also morbidly obese. (Alession 114) She also had asthma and later arthritis in the ends of her fingers. Shirley started to even have anxiety attacks. For a while she was under a psychiatrist’s care. Miss Jackson never let this keep her down. During the worst periods of her life she never stopped working; she used her typewriter as her therapy. (Hall 36) In 1959 she began working on her 3rd novel in which she finished three years later called We have Always Lived in the Castle. It made the best sellers list and was in the Time magazine as one of the top ten novels of the year. (Hall 37) Her daily living became easier for her and the anxiety was going away. She was recovering and her sessions with the psychiatrist were slowly tapering off. But sadly to say on a Sunday afternoon Miss Jackson went upstairs to take a nap and never woke up again. Her daughter Sally went to wake her up but found her mother had passed away in her sleep (Hall 40).

In 1945 Mr. Hyman was offered a teaching position at Bennington College. The family then moved to North Bennington. In the same year Shirley gave birth to her second child Joanne. Between 1945 and 1947 Shirley worked on her first novel called The Road through the Wall, which had a setting similar to the town she grew up in Burlingame, California. After the novel was published their third child Sarah was born

In the fall of 1933, Shirley’s father received a promotion in which he became the President of his company’s new western division in Rochester, New York (Hall 19). Shirley transferred into Brighton High School where she had struggled “between her individual expression and social acceptance”. “Her grades were unremarkable, but she wrote regularly and even completed some stories.” After graduating in 1934, Shirley enrolled in The University of Rochester. “She spent two unhappy years there, feeling uninspired academically and socially bored-the classes were gender segregated.” Shortly after Shirley left school she suffered a nervous breakdown (Alessio 116).

(Burn 378).

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