Classic Review: WE HAVE ALWAYS LIVED IN THE CASTLE

Merricat Blackwood, her older sister Constance, and their Uncle Julian live in a manor home separate from a nearby village. Constance has not left the home or the estate since the events of six years prior when the rest of the family died from poisoning and she was tried and acquitted of the crime. Julian is wheelchair bound and he spends his days reliving and writing about the day of that gruesome event. Only Merricat has contact with the outside world as she is tasked with going to the village twice a week for shopping and for library books. While in town she is often mocked and derided by the villagers and their children. Once home, the three carry on happily in their solitary existences. Then one day Cousin Charles shows up and all the daily patterns and schedules are thrown off. Merricat clearly does not like her cousin and vise versa. Charles is also very disrespectful to Uncle Julian but he seems to have formed an alliance with Constance. This really upsets both Merricat and Julian leading to a disastrous outcome.

We Have Always Lived in the Castle was Shirley Jackson's last, and many say best, novel. It was published in 1962. The book is often categorized as gothic horror. It is not super creepy but there is a very sinister undercurrent to the tale. Who poisoned the family if not Constance and why are the sisters so satisfied to live alone in the manor, sequestered from the outside world? And why does Julian say that Merricat is dead? Is she a ghost? I don't think so, but it made me wonder

In his introduction to the 2006 Penguin Edition, writer Jonathan Lethem says the village in the story is probably North Bennington, Vermont where the author and her college professor husband lived and encountered "reflexive anti-semitism and anti-intellectualism." Oh boy, wouldn't you hate to be from there knowing the whole world now knows this about you? All of Jackson's works deal with everyday evils but this book also probes themes of love and devotion despite a general feeling of unease and the oddness characters. Jackson struggled with agoraphobia as did the character Constance in the book. Oppenheimer, one of Jackson's biographers, said that Merricat and Constance "were the yin and yang of Shirley's inner self." Hmm...agoraphobic, anti-social, accused murderers...not sure I'd like to be associated with these traits. But the sisters were indeed devoted to one another, so there is that.

According to Wikipedia, the lead paragraph of We Have Always Lived in the Castle is the "best opening paragraph of any novel." The language is described as "so coercive it is impossible not to keep on reading." I have to admit, the paragraph is quite unexpected. I read on.

“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, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and *Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death- cup mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead.”

*A reclusive relative of England's Richard the III. 

I liked the book a lot. 4.25 stars.

-Anne