We Have Always Lived in the Castle

First published in 1962, Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle is a darkly enchanting tale of family secrets, small-town hostility and the fragile refuge of an outsider’s imagination. Merricat Blackwood lives in near-seclusion with her sister Constance and their ailing Uncle Julian in the family’s once-grand house, the last survivors of a household shattered by a mysterious poisoning. When their cousin Charles arrives, bringing the ambitions and assumptions of the outside world into their carefully guarded existence, the sisters’ precarious sanctuary begins to unravel.

Narrated in Merricat’s distinctive voice, the novel moves between fairy-tale enchantment and mounting psychological unease, leaving the reader to question what lies beneath her rituals, fantasies and fierce devotion to Constance. Jackson’s subtle examination of misogyny, social cruelty, guilt and the desire to belong transforms a seemingly isolated family drama into a chilling portrait of a community’s capacity for persecution. Written near the end of Jackson’s life, it distils the qualities that make her one of the most distinctive voices in twentieth-century American fiction: an exacting sense of atmosphere, a wickedly dry humour and an unerring understanding of the darkness that can gather around ordinary people.

From the book

“I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because werewolves are not held to the same standards as humans.”

— Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle

On We Have Always Lived in the Castle

“A masterpiece of gothic fiction.”

— The New York Times