Given the political climate, there has never been a better time for a revival of Shirley Jackson's fiction, with its unflinching portrayal of racial and sexual prejudice, the self-absorption of suburban America, and the thuggery beneath the surface of society. Even The Simpsons has featured “The Lottery” (1948) as a chilling tale of conformity gone mad. With all Jackson's works back in print; new editions of the uncollected short stories; a Library of America volume; adaptations for ballet, drama and film; a graphic novelization of “The Lottery”; and even a “Shirley Jackson Day” in North Bennington, the small community which inspired some of her most disquieting works, the time is ripe for another biography. Ruth Franklin draws upon previously unknown archival materials; letters to family, friends and fans; correspondence with her literary agents; her husband's letters; a plethora of interviews; and painstaking manuscript scrutiny, to scotch many of the prevalent Jackson myths. “The Lottery” was not published unrevised, or all that speedily; Jackson jokily overplayed her interest in black magic; and she shaved three years off her age. Unusually, Franklin does not undervalue Jackson's comic gifts (in her writing and in cartoons and drawings reproduced here), and also situates her firmly in relation to the status of women in her society. Almost twenty years before Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique (1963), Jackson was exposing the ways in which society propagated the housewife myth, with women entirely defined by their families, fatally so in the case of the sacrificed victim of “The Lottery.” (However, Friedan herself misread Jackson badly, missing the satiric attack on the joys of domesticity in Life among the Savages (1953) and Raising Demons (1957)). Essentially, Jackson's works offer a sustained counternarrative to the ideology of her time, and not merely the domestic ideology. Franklin firmly insists on Jackson's status as a major twentieth-century writer, who has previously been inaccurately pigeonholed by gender or genre (she was dubbed Virginia Werewolf, in one review). She is highly informative on her relations with the New Yorker (which paid Jackson even less than John Cheever), and her role in an intellectual circle which included Howard Nemerov, Kenneth Burke, Bernard Malamud and Ralph Ellison (who wrote chapters of Invisible Man in her home.) While Franklin's biography is less of a racy read than Judy Oppenheimer's Private Demons (1988), on which it draws, she gives a full account of Jackson's miseries, ranging from her hypercritical mother and relentlessly adulterous husband to anti-Semitism and the FBI. (The family had too many left-wing books and were denounced by a removal man.) She does not underplay Jackson's dependence on alcohol, tobacco and prescription drugs, or her battles with obesity, anxiety and agoraphobia, and gives an unsparing account of the lurid nightmares, murderous fantasies and dreams of escape of her final period. Although the biography ends strongly, Jackson did not. This is, in short, a good biography but it is not a full literary-critical biography. Although chapters are devoted to all the major works, the readings of them essentially depend upon previous literary scholars who have led the turn in Jackson criticism away from the early emphasis on the Gothic, symbolic and psychoanalytical (the current reviewer pleads guilty) and towards broader historical and cultural interpretations. Almost no academic scholars feature in the index, or are named in the text. They populate the endnotes, but as there are no numbers in the text to signal that a note exists, they are reduced to an appropriately spectral presence. The brevity of the notes, and the absence of a critical bibliography, also means that reprinted works are not supplied with their date of first publication, making it impossible to get a sense of the evolving reception of Jackson over time, and adding to the impression that Jackson lacks scholarly attention. The reader is not steered towards Paul N. Reinsch's excellent critical bibliography, a real omission.Footnote ¹ Without wading through the seventy-seven pages of unindexed endnotes the reader will be unaware of books by Lenemaja Friedman, Joan Wylie Hall, Harold Bloom, Darryl Hattenhauer, and Bernice M. Murphy, whose 2005 collection firmly advanced the historicist reading.Footnote ² (Murphy features in the text as an unnamed “scholar” (6)). Along with new critical essays, Murphy reprints several articles on which Franklin draws for her readings, notably Marta Caminero-Santangelo's landmark 1996 account of The Bird's Nest (1954) and multiple personality, which depicts Jackson as a writer strategically inhabiting and reconfiguring current literary, medical or popular models of madness, in order to counter representation with representation.Footnote ³ Other reprinted essays relate the dystopian vision of The Sundial (1958) to American “bomb shelter” paranoia (Rich Pascal, 2000), and the apocalyptic tenor of the era (John G. Parks, 1984). Franklin may be in good company in drawing upon critics who situate Jackson in relation to the dominant discourses of her society, but (like the protagonist of The Haunting of Hill House (1959)) it would have been useful to know whose hand she was holding.