We missed June 27, the official day Shirley Jackson‘s “The Lottery” takes place. It’s a counterpart to Bloomsday earlier in the month, on June 16. You know the story: In a small-time American town, citizens gather every year to implore an unnamed force to grant a good corn harvest. The citizens draw slips of paper from a wooden box to select a victim for human sacrifice. A young mother draws the losing card, and is stoned to death by the community. The end.
Hundreds of letters poured into the New Yorker when it was first published in 1948. What did the story mean? According to her husband, the literary critic Stanley Edgar Hyman, “she consistently refused to be interviewed, to explain or promote her work in any fashion, or to take public stands and be the pundit of the Sunday supplements. She believed that her books would speak for her clearly enough over the years.”
That’s not quite true. She told the San Francisco Chronicle a month after the story was published: “Explaining just what I had hoped the story to say is very difficult. I suppose, I hoped, by setting a particularly brutal ancient rite in the present and in my own village to shock the story’s readers with a graphic dramatization of the pointless violence and general inhumanity in their own lives.”
And how was the story written? According to Jackson, speaking at a lecture, “I had the idea fairly clearly in my mind when I put my daughter in her playpen and the frozen vegetables in the refrigerator and, writing the story, I found that it went quickly and easily, moving from beginning to end without pause. As a matter of fact, when I read it over later I decided that except for one or two minor corrections, it needed no changes, and the story I finally typed up and sent off to my agent the next day was almost word for word the original draft.”
The single change was a request from the New Yorker editor who reviewed the first draft, who asked “that the date mentioned in the story be changed to coincide with the date of the issue of the magazine in which the story would appear, and I said of course.”
That’s not quite true, either. William Brennan‘s article in Slate, which came out last month in time for Lottery Day, corrects the record, after he made a trip to the Library of Congress, which holds Jackson’s records. You can read the list of his discoveries in “How Shirley Jackson Wrote ‘The Lottery'” here.
Here’s something I didn’t know. Jackson wrote The Haunting of Hill House, which was adapted in the Robert Wise film The Haunting, with Julie Harris and Claire Bloom. Scared the bejeebers out of me when I was an imaginative little kid. I’ve refused to go to horror movies ever since.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 24th, 2013 at 10:50 pm	by Cynthia Haven and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
I’ve never had any problems teaching the story, and I’m always amazed at how it apparently caused so many queries at the time. It’s a story about rituals–the kinds of things we do on Valentine’s Day, Passover, Easter, May Day (lost these days), Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, et al. Many ancient societies had human sacrifices as part of their rituals; the Greeks refined this into the ritual sacrifice of a goat (which is where we get tragedy). We perform the same sacrificial rituals with little sense of what they mean, and much less of what they originally meant. Jackson imaginatively proposed an isolated community where one of these ancient fertility rites had managed to survive. I suggest watching the opening scenes of Pasolini’s brilliant “Medea,” which capture the past where the rituals may have come from.
Longbourn is the house in which Jane Austen set Pride and Prejudice. Jo Baker's novel is the story of the servants who washed the Bennet girls' linen, soothed Mrs Bennet when she was distressed, indulged Mr Bennet when they were obliged to indulge him and all the time carried on with their own unregarded lives.
It is a brilliant premise for a novel and from it Jo Baker has developed a set of characters every bit as absorbing as the family whom they serve. Their lives are painted with compassion but without sentimentality. The fortunes and misfortunes of the Bennets affect them greatly, of course, but it is their own struggle for happiness with which Longbourn is concerned.
Clever though the premise is, it is not the best thing about this book. The best thing is the writing, and, in particular, the description - the eye for small details, the awareness of the sensuality of objects. In beautifully turned prose, the rhythms of domesticity are intertwined with the rhythms of the natural world so effectively as to make you feel like you are actually there, in Longbourn, experiencing the world of the servants with its unceasing demands and stolen compensations. A novel to be savoured .
Just a reading list of historical fiction ebooks from my public library (uses overdrive). More than books pictured.
I never thought it was possible to think less of Wickham, detest Mr. Bennet more so, or sympathize with Mrs. Bennet despite her goings on about her nerves. In the kitchens and horse barns real characters live and work, ones which I found easier to connect with than Elizabeth or Jane who are represented as rather more aloof and unknowing of what must happen behind the scenes to afford their quality of life. I think there's a more mature and captivating love story between the restless Sarah and the wandering James, who both carry with them both figurative and quite literal emotional baggage. Honestly, James Smith is too good for this world and I'd take him over Ptolemy, no doubt.
First of all, several people describe it as a retelling of Pride and Prejudice and i think that's really misleading. This book has little to do with P&P and that was disappointing to me. Just as the servants were in the background of P&P, P&P was in the background of Longbourn. That makes sense with P&P, but is problematic in the case of Longbourn because its huge draw is the fact that it is a "retelling of P&P".
I did like simply thinking about the servants and all they had to go through to allow the wealthy to live their lives of luxury. The line on the inside cover was probably my favorite in the whole book: "If Elizabeth Bennet had the washing of her own petticoats, Sarah often thought, she'd most likely be a sight more careful with them."
However, they seemed to have very modern attitudes, which is a fault that many TV shows, movies and books contain these days. For example, it seemed unlikely that the servants would dwell so much on the dirty tasks they had to do. If that was your job and life, thinking about how much you hate it all the time would only make your life miserable. I just think more of them would have accepted that that's the way things were.
I didn't really care about any of the characters. Especially not James, despite so much of the book being spent trying to convince me that i desperately needed to know what happened in his past. When he disappeared, i really couldn't have cared less whether he was dead or alive, happy or miserable.
Baker definitely added some grit to the story. Plenty of details about human waste as well as mentions of masturbation, homosexuality and adultery. I wasn't a fan of all that. And the Bennets (except Mary) are portrayed so negatively. Even Jane. Sweet Jane. It's like we're supposed to scorn the Bennet family for employing servants period.
I didn't appreciate the secret illegitimate son added to Mr. Bennet's backstory. I did, however, approve of the addition of Mrs. Bennet's miscarriage. That's definitely something that could easily have happened before the events of P&P. I also think it realistic that Wickham would have taken advantage of the maids, so i didn't mind that addition.
I did like the research that went into Longbourn and that Baker was careful to make sure the timeline lined up. I just think that the whole thing fell short of what it could have been. It was a good idea, but poorly executed.
I think the people who dislike this book because they don't like the way Elizabeth or other Bennets act in it really need to venture out of their protective bubble.
There's a reason the characters in Longbourn are mentioned only in passing in [book:Pride and Prejudice|1885]: it's because the upper classes barely noticed that the servant class existed. The portrayal of the Bennets in this book seems perfectly in line with their portrayal in the book; they are kind to the servants, they are not monsters, but they have a sense of entitlement -- which is barely noticed when the story is told from their perspective, but which rankles a bit when you see it through the eyes of those who must work to make sure the Bennets continue to receive what they feel entitled to, whether it is new shoe roses despite the rain or three warm meals each day.
Although I consider myself a Jane Austen fan and I like the romance between Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy, I get easily irritated by the Jane-ites that fawn over the romance in the books as though Austen was merely a writer of Harlequins and not a woman who was attempting to critique the society in which she lived even as she upheld it. And I have limited patience for books such as [book:Austenland|248483] and [book:The Jane Austen Book Club|2152] that seem fixated on "cute-sy-fying" Austen.
What I loved about Longbourn is that it brought Regency England back down to earth. There are cold mornings, chamber pots to be emptied, a war in Spain, wealth that is acquired through connections with the slave trade. This should not "tarnish" our view of the original works but instead deepen it with a more complete appreciation of their full context. This book is rich in sensory and historical details and delves fully into the lives of those who are often considered disposable and forgettable by history -- and yes, by Austen herself, whether you like it or not.
Although it does have some similar themes to P&P, it is not too obvious, nor does it cripple itself by trying too hard to emulate the source material. At the same time, this book is eminently faithful to the original -- all the events are the same -- and only the perspectives are different. This time, the Bennets are in the background, and while this might be disappointing to those hoping to slather over a new take on Elizabeth and Darcy's love, I found it to be perfectly acceptable because the main characters here are fully realized enough that we don't need to rely on an old, beloved story to make it through. I also appreciated that, because this book was written much later than P&P, it could more fully explore issues that would have been improper to write about then, such as just how creepy Wickham might have been, what happened when children were born out of wedlock, etc.
It was a little slow to start, and I found my interest waning in the section about James near the end, which took the action away from the core group of women we had been following for the rest of the book. But it is definitely a worthwhile read, especially if you enjoy well-rendered, intimate historical fiction, and whether you love, hate, or are indifferent to its source material.