We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson: Background information when reading How Can I Help You

We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson

This article relates to How Can I Help You

The power of a book is unquantifiable, depending on who reads it. When the character Margo Finch in Laura Sims's How Can I Help You catches her new colleague, Patricia Delmarco, fondly touching a particular title on the shelf at the Carlyle Public Library, it pulls her deep into a world where fantasy and reality often overlap.

Fans of beloved author Shirley Jackson will be delighted to see the appearance of We Have Always Lived in the Castle in the pages of this frenetic literary thriller. Jackson (1916-1965) was an American novelist and short story writer known as a master of gothic horror and psychological suspense. Her most famous novel, The Haunting of Hill House (1959), has been adapted into movies and a television series, but it was her surreal and disturbing short story "The Lottery" (1948) that garnered her the most critical acclaim. Relying often on supernatural themes, she was known for "tackling provocative, chilling subject matter that was culturally incisive and held metaphors for how people dealt with differences," as a Biography article puts it.

Published in 1962, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, her last novel, focuses on the haunting story of two sisters: Mary Katherine (Merricat) and Constance Blackwood. They live in a run-down old mansion with their uncle, Julian, and are shunned by the townspeople, who believe Constance poisoned the other Blackwood family members with arsenic years before. Merricat reveals the level of her antisocial behavior when a long-lost cousin, Charles, shows up on the scene to "help" Constance with the estate. Things do not go well.

Margo is drawn by the book's cover (likely that of a 1984 Penguin Books edition) showing a forbidding woman standing "behind a locked gate with vines climbing up its bars, her face partly shadowed. A handwritten sign on the gate reads: NO TRESPASSING/PRIVATE … It gives me a cool shiver—something I didn't know books could do." The twin themes of isolation and alienation are something Margo is intimately acquainted with, as she guards her secrets as fiercely as Merricat does Constance and their home.

Margo even quotes a long passage from We Have Always Lived in the Castle in the novel. She increasingly identifies with Merricat. She is angry, sad, and forlorn when the book ends, as all books do. In this reaction, Margo exhibits the occupational hazard of fiction readers everywhere: the pain of separation when beloved characters exit the stage. It is a new sensation for her as she slides the book slowly back onto the shelf from whence it raged into her heart: "I will hold you in my heart, I say to Constance and Merricat. With a tinge of bitterness, though, as I pull my hand from the book and back away."

Penguin Orange Collection cover of We Have Always Lived in the Castle

Filed under Books and Authors

This "beyond the book article" relates to How Can I Help You. It originally ran in August 2023 and has been updated for the June 2024 paperback edition. Go to magazine.