we have always lived in the castle cover

Merricat, said Connie, would you like to go to sleep? Merricat, said Connie, would you like a cup of tea? Only Merricat ventures infrequently into town, to collect groceries and books from the library, and when she does she is greeted by the cruel rhymes of children: After all, did she not wash out the sugar bowl before the police arrived, on the pretext of there being a spider in it? And Uncle Julian only a little, so though poisoned with the rest of them he survived, albeit with ailing health.Īs one might expect, a mythology grows around the surviving Blackwoods, with Constance generally believed to have committed the murders.

Merricat had been sent to her room before supper, so had no pudding. The rest of the dynasty was wiped out when someone put arsenic in the sugar bowl and the family, as was their wont, sprinkled it on dessert. The Blackwood girls are the last surviving remnants of this grand old family, along with Uncle Julian, infirm in body and often in mind. They are Mary Katherine – Merricat – who is 18, headstrong and simultaneously naive and worldly and older sister Constance, who ventures no further than her garden in the rambling, tumbledown grounds of the Blackwood family home, perched aloof above the small town.

The author was a troubled figure at the end of her life, and Castle, published in 1961, has in its two female lead characters what Jackson’s biographer Judy Oppenheimer calls the “yin and yang of Shirley’s own inner self” – “one, an explorer, a challenger, the other a contented, domestic homebody”. But while these and the rest of Jackson’s oeuvre are indeed sublime, it is Castle about which I am most evangelical and that I press upon people at every opportunity. Jackson, who died 50 years ago, is perhaps best known for her short story The Lottery and her novel The Haunting of Hill House, twice-filmed and considered to be the last word in haunted-house tales.

We have always lived in the castle cover