Ruth Franklin’s long-awaited study Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life is a biography of the very first order: part reclamation, part social history, and all a riveting read. It definitively establishes the “literary sorceress” Jackson as much more than the author of the iconic short story "The Lottery." Weaving together details of Jackson’s tumultuous life with critical readings of her work, Franklin reveals the dominant themes that would come to pervade not only her fiction, but the preoccupations of American women during the postwar period. The book has been praised by authors like Neil Gaiman, Mary Beard, and Meg Wolitzer who says, “Ruth Franklin’s absorbing book feelingly creates not only a portrait of Shirley Jackson the writer, but also provides a stirring sense of what it was like to navigate (and sometimes circumvent) the strictures of American society as a wife, mother, artist, and woman.” Franklin talks about Jackson with acclaimed novelist Rivka Galchen, author most recently of Little Labors.

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