# We Have Always Lived in the Castle

Author: Shirley Jackson · 1962

My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all, I could have been born a werewolf.

## Review

This is Shirley Jackson's final novel and her most personal. Merricat Blackwood and her sister Constance live isolated in their family estate after most of the family died of arsenic poisoning — for which Constance was tried and acquitted. The village hates them. Merricat hates the village. She buries talismans, talks to her cat, and maintains elaborate rituals to protect their world.

When cousin Charles arrives to claim the estate's money, their fragile universe begins to shatter. Jackson inverts the gothic formula: the monster is out there in the village, in the mob, in normalcy. Merricat's twisted logic becomes completely coherent — even sympathetic — as the novel progresses.

Jackson was seriously ill when she wrote Castle; the siege at the novel's climax, where the villagers destroy the house while the sisters hide, has the quality of lived nightmare. A devastating, darkly funny masterwork that Time named one of the 100 best English-language novels.

## Why read this

Where Hill House unsettles you, Castle disturbs you on a different frequency. It's a novel about the violence of 'normal' society directed at those who are different, told from inside the mind of someone who has chosen her own kind of freedom. If you only read one Shirley Jackson novel, read Hill House. If you read two, this is the second.

## Themes

- Female outsiders
- Gothic isolation
- Social violence
- Unreliable narrator
- Darkly comic

## Buy

Kindle (affiliate): https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CRV98N31?tag=cyberlibrar00-20

Source page: https://www.cyberlibrary.org/en/lists/gothic-fiction/we-have-always-lived-in-the-castle/

## Free public-domain picks on Cyber Library

- [Dracula](https://www.cyberlibrary.org/en/books/dracula/) — Bram Stoker
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