The Letters of Shirley Jackson

Time to Read
9 hrs 18 mins

Reading Time

9 hrs 18 mins

How long to read The Letters of Shirley Jackson?

The estimated word count of The Letters of Shirley Jackson is 139,500 words.

A person reading at the average speed of 250 words/min, will finish the book in 9 hrs 18 mins. At a slower speed of 150 words/min, they will finish it in 15 hrs 30 mins. At a faster speed of 450 words/min, they will finish it in 5 hrs 10 mins.

The Letters of Shirley Jackson - 139,500 words
Reading Speed Time to Read
Slow 150 words/min 15 hrs 30 mins
Average 250 words/min 9 hrs 18 mins
Fast 450 words/min 5 hrs 10 mins
The Letters of Shirley Jackson by Shirley Jackson
Authors
Shirley Jackson

More about The Letters of Shirley Jackson

139,500 words

Word Count

for The Letters of Shirley Jackson

640 pages

Pages
Hardcover: 640 pages

15 hours

Audiobook length


Description

This bewitching collection of never-before-published letters from the renowned author of "The Lottery" and The Haunting of Hill House brilliantly draws out flashes of the uncanny in the domestic, sparks of horror in the quotidian, and the veins of humor that run through good times and bad.Shirley Jackson is one of the most important American authors of the last hundred years and among our greatest writers of the female experience. This extraordinary compilation of personal correspondence has all the hallmarks of Jackson's beloved fiction, and also features Shirley's own witty line drawings. I must stop writing letters and get to writing a novel. If you think of any good scenes for a novel covering about forty pages send them right along. I can use anything I can get. Written over the course of nearly three decades, from Jackson's college years to six days before her early death at the age of forty-eight, these letters become the autobiography Shirley Jackson never wrote, full of subversive wit, vivid imagination, and precisely calibrated prose. As well as being a bestselling author, Jackson spent much of her adult life as a mother of four in Vermont, and the landscape here is often the everyday: dream vacations and trips to the dentist; overdue taxes and frayed lines of Christmas lights; new dogs and new babies. But in recounting these events to family, friends, and colleagues, she turns them into remarkable stories: entertaining, revealing, and wise. At the same time, many of these letters provide fresh insight into the genesis and progress of Jackson's writing over nearly three decades.The novel is getting sadder. I suppose it's because of a general melancholy, but a general air of disaster is slowly settling over Hill House. It's always such a strange feeling--I know something's going to happen, and those poor people in the book don't; they just go blithely on their ways.This intimate collection holds the beguiling prism of Shirley Jackson--writer and teacher, mother and daughter, neighbor and wife--up to the light.