Trivia / Shirley Jackson

• What Could Have Been:
  • Toward the end of her life, after an extensive battle with writer's block, Jackson attempted to write a children's novel titled The Fair Land of Far, based on her long admiration for the Land of Oz series (which she had read as a child and subsequently introduced to her own children). Although she had expressed an interest in such a book at various points in her career, The Fair Land of Far appears to have been only a writing experiment intended to see if she could write after a long drought, and only the first chapter was ever completed. Jackson set the remainder aside in favor of Come Along With Me, and never had a chance to return to it before she died.
  • Come Along With Me was intended to be a significant change in style and tone from Jackson's previous works, having been conceived after Jackson was in therapy for some of her psychological issues. However, she died suddenly after completing only a few chapters.
  • Prior to her marriage, Jackson was working on a novel titled Anthony. From the section of the novel she produced, it appeared that this novel would center around a homosexual male character—quite controversial for a female novelist in the 1930s. Eventually the project ran out of steam, and she shelved it.
  • Similarly to the above, the original plot of We Have Always Lived in the Castle involved two unrelated, adult women, one a spinster and the other unhappily married, who together plot to kill off the husband and live together in solitude. In the planning stages, Jackson became concerned that the two main female leads would be mistaken for lesbians and altered them to be a pair of sisters.
  • The original plan for The Sundial would reveal that the world really did end and that the members of the Halloran house were the only survivors. Jackson wrote several potential endings for this scenario, some in which the new world was a true paradise that the characters clearly intended to make as unhappy as their old world, others in which they embraced the new world peacefully. In the end, Jackson settled on a more ambiguous ending, and the various other possibilities never made it past the drafting stage.