The real horrors behind Netflix’s The Haunting of Hill House

Anyone who has read Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House – now finding a new audience as a popular Netflix adaptation – will find a couple of details of its 1959 reception almost too neat to be true.

Jackson had been writing novels and stories for nearly two decades before embarking on her tale of Hill House, a mansion where visitors can turn up any time they like but find it rather hard to leave.

Her earlier works were striking, wrote Jackson’s biographer Ruth Franklin a couple of years ago, not only because they were such accomplished contributions to the strain of American gothic that includes Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe and Henry James, but because they foregrounded women. Her stories feature single women desperate for the social acceptance of marriage, or married women trapped in domestic situations so stifling they were (often malevolent) characters in their own right. Jackson herself was increasingly desperate in her marriage and in the imposed role of homemaker.

The Haunting of Hill House was her first book to earn its advance, and more: Franklin notes that Jackson used the surplus to pay off her mortgage. Its film rights were sold and turned into a movie by directorRobert Wise, who had just finished making West Side Story and would go on to make The Sound of Music.

The book was a finalist for a National Book Award along with novels by Saul Bellow, John Updike and Philip Roth (who won with Goodbye, Columbus) – writers who became household names synonymous with seriousness, while Jackson’s body of work was dismissed as middlebrow thrills, skilfully produced by a housewife who, unhelpfully to herself, sometimes claimed to be an amateur witch.