We Have Always Lived in the Castle: A Dark and Compelling Tale of Isolation and Madness
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Six years before the story opens, arsenic goes into the sugar bowl at the Blackwood family dinner, and most of the family dies at the table. Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle begins in the aftermath, with the survivors still in the house and the village still watching it. It was published in 1962, runs under two hundred pages in most paperback editions, and was her last novel. The first sections of this review stay clear of the ending. A marked section further down covers it.
Shirley Jackson and the Making of the Book
Jackson was born in San Francisco on December 14, 1916. She married Stanley Edgar Hyman in 1940, and the couple raised four children in North Bennington, Vermont, where Hyman taught at Bennington College. “The Lottery” ran in The New Yorker in 1948. The Haunting of Hill House followed in 1959. According to Wikipedia’s article on Jackson, severe anxiety and agoraphobia kept her housebound for long stretches in her last years, and by 1964 therapy had helped enough that she resumed ordinary activities. She died in her sleep at home on August 8, 1965, aged 48.
Viking Press published the novel in 1962. Wikipedia’s entry on the book gives September 21 as the publication date and notes a dedication to her publisher, Pascal Covici. The same entry reports that Time named it one of the ten best novels of 1962. The edition most readers meet now is the Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition, issued October 31, 2006, with an introduction by the novelist Jonathan Lethem; the Open Library record lists it at 160 pages. Page counts shift between printings.
Three Survivors and a Village That Wants Them Gone
Mary Katherine Blackwood, called Merricat, is eighteen and does the household’s errands. Her older sister Constance, twenty-eight, has not left the garden in six years. Their Uncle Julian uses a wheelchair, survived the poisoning, and spends his days writing an account of it, often confused about the details. Constance was tried for the murders and acquitted. The village made up its own mind anyway.
Merricat’s walk into town is the book’s recurring set piece: the shops, the taunts, and then the return to a property she guards with sympathetic magic, rituals she treats as seriously as the groceries. Into this arrangement comes a cousin, Charles. He wins Constance’s trust and plainly has his eye on the money in the family safe. Julian distrusts him. Merricat sets out to get rid of him.
A Narrator Who Gives Away Very Little
The first sentence is as plain as a line on a form.
“My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood.”
(Opening sentence of the novel, as transcribed in Book Riot’s 2016 piece on Jackson’s openings.)
Writing for Jackson’s centenary, Book Riot staff writer Annika Barranti Klein argued that the few sentences that follow tell a reader almost everything about Merricat, and that the paragraph “rivals that of The Haunting in its sheer perfection.” The comparison is to one of the best-known openings in American horror, and it holds up. Merricat reports arsenic, a trial and a house under siege in the same tone she uses for errands, and the gap between that cheerful, matter-of-fact voice and the facts underneath is where the dread comes from. Wikipedia’s summary of Lethem’s introduction describes the language as deceptively simple and the narrator as unreliable. Nothing in her account is false in a way a first-time reader can catch. A good deal of it is withheld.
The Village Is the Other Character
Communities that turn on people they have labeled outsiders run through Jackson’s fiction. The Wikipedia article on the novel traces the pattern through The Haunting of Hill House and, less centrally, The Sundial. It also relays Lethem’s observation that the unnamed town is pretty well recognizable as North Bennington, where Jackson and Hyman met prejudice against Jews and against intellectuals.
The villagers are not cartoon villains. They are neighbors, and the contempt is ordinary: a remark at the counter, a story everyone already knows. That ordinariness is what makes the Blackwoods’ withdrawal feel less like eccentricity and more like a reasonable response to the weather.
Horror, Fairy Tale, or Self-Portrait
The genre label depends on who is applying it. Wikipedia’s infobox lists psychological horror, mystery, thriller and Gothic. Reviewing the Penguin Modern Classics reissue on the Reading Matters blog in 2009, the reviewer who posts as kimbofo did not read it as horror at all. She called it “a kind of twisted fairytale” with black comedy and mystery mixed in. She also guessed the central revelation before the halfway point and still enjoyed it, which is a fair measure of how little the book depends on surprise.
Other readers rate it higher still. The Book Smugglers blog scored it a perfect 10 out of 10 in 2012 and praised its narration and fairy-tale shape, and compared it favorably with The Haunting of Hill House. The reservations that do appear are narrow. A reader who wants events will find few, since the book is a situation more than a sequence. A reader who spots the secret early will spend the second half watching it confirmed.
A third reading treats the book as autobiography in code. Wikipedia’s article cites Jackson’s biographer Judy Oppenheimer for calling it “a paean to agoraphobia,” and Jackson’s own housebound years give the sisters’ closed-off world a personal source. The three readings do not cancel each other out. The book seems to hold all of them without strain.
Spoilers Ahead: How It Ends
Stop here if the ending is still unread.
The fire starts with Merricat. After Charles settles in, she pushes his pipe into a wastebasket of newspapers, and the upper floor burns. The villagers who arrive to put it out stay to ransack the rooms. Julian dies of apparent heart failure during the fire, and Charles goes for the safe.
Afterward Constance says she has always known that Merricat poisoned the family. Merricat confirms it and gives her reason: she knew Constance did not take sugar. The sisters salvage what they can and settle into the fire-damaged house, which now looks like a castle open to the sky. Villagers leave food on the step. Charles returns once, with a journalist, and Constance ignores him.
As Wikipedia summarizes it, Lethem’s introduction reads Constance’s refusal to judge Merricat as the book’s unusual statement about love, and the sisters’ permanent retreat as Merricat’s triumph. The opposite reading rests on the same evidence: two people who have stopped answering to anyone, in a house that can no longer keep out the weather, fed by neighbors who leave food on the step. The book declines to choose.
On Stage and Screen
Hugh Wheeler adapted the novel for Broadway in 1966. The production, with Heather Menzies, Shirley Knight and Alan Webb, opened at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre on October 19 and closed on October 26 after 11 performances. A musical version by Adam Bock and Todd Almond played at Yale Repertory Theatre in New Haven from September 23 to October 9, 2010.
The film took longer. Michael Douglas’s Further Films optioned the book in August 2009, with a script by Mark Kruger. Stacie Passon directed, and principal photography ran from August 8 to September 9, 2016, in Bray and Dublin, Ireland. Taissa Farmiga plays Merricat, Alexandra Daddario is Constance, Crispin Glover plays Julian and Sebastian Stan is Charles. It premiered at the LA Film Festival on September 22, 2018, and Brainstorm Media released it in the United States on May 17, 2019. Wikipedia reports an 87 percent approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes from 31 reviews and a Metacritic score of 63 out of 100 from eight critics; aggregate figures drift over time.
The trailer released ahead of the 2019 release, as embedded by JoBlo:
Critics did not agree. NPR’s review, headlined “We Have Always Lived In The Castle — And It Feels Like It,” found the film too muted. Its verdict was that “the Blackwood manor mostly seems like just an old house”, and it argued that Merricat’s unreliable perspective does not carry over to the screen, which reduces her to a frightened, stunted girl. A different judgment appeared in October 2025, when Tom’s Guide streaming writer Alix Blackburn picked the film out after it turned up on Netflix, called it underrated, and warned that it is “definitely not for everyone.” Streaming availability varies by country and changes often, so check a current listing.
Jackson in the Conversation Now
The author has become a character, too. The 2020 film Shirley, directed by Josephine Decker, stars Elisabeth Moss as Jackson and Michael Stuhlbarg as Hyman. It adapts Susan Scarf Merrell’s 2014 novel Shirley, not a book by Jackson herself. The Shirley Jackson Awards, established in 2007 with the permission of her estate, honor psychological suspense, horror and dark fantasy, and are presented at Readercon.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is it a horror novel?
That depends on the definition. There is a poisoning, a house under siege and a narrator who withholds. There are no ghosts and little gore. Wikipedia lists psychological horror, mystery, thriller and Gothic; at least one reviewer, kimbofo on Reading Matters, read it as a fairy tale instead.
Does it need to be read after The Haunting of Hill House?
No. The two are separate novels with different characters, published three years apart, in 1959 and 1962. What they share is Jackson’s interest in houses and in communities that turn on people.
Should the introduction be read first?
Not in this edition. The Book Smugglers reviewer warned that Lethem’s introduction in some editions “completely and utterly spoils the story.” The Penguin Classics edition carries that introduction, so the safer order is the novel first.
Is there a film, and where can it be watched?
Yes. Stacie Passon’s adaptation premiered in September 2018 and reached US audiences in May 2019. Tom’s Guide reported it on Netflix in October 2025. Check a current listing for your country.
How long is the book?
Open Library lists the Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition at 160 pages. Wikipedia gives 214 pages for the first hardcover and 173 for a paperback.
Where to Read It
We Have Always Lived in the Castle (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) (affiliate link). This 2006 printing, ISBN 0143039970, is the one linked from the buy button at the top of the page, and its Lethem introduction is best saved for after the last chapter.
Further Reading
Reading Matters, October 2009: kimbofo’s spoiler-light review of the Penguin Modern Classics reissue, which compares the book’s mood to The Wicker Man and Village of the Damned. The Book Smugglers, 2012: a 10 out of 10 review that is deliberately vague about the plot. More book reviews on this site: Animal Farm: A Political Allegory of Totalitarianism and The Power of Knowledge: A Review of “Fahrenheit 451”.
Sources
- We Have Always Lived in the Castle — Wikipedia
- We Have Always Lived in the Castle (film) — Wikipedia
- Shirley Jackson — Wikipedia
- ISBN 0143039970 record — Open Library
- The Magic of Shirley Jackson’s Opening Paragraphs — Book Riot
- We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson — Reading Matters
- Book Review: We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson — The Book Smugglers
- ‘We Have Always Lived In The Castle’ — And It Feels Like It — NPR
- Farmiga & Daddario star in trailer for We Have Always Lived in the Castle — JoBlo
- Netflix just added one of the strangest mystery thriller movies — Tom’s Guide
