We Have Always Lived in the Castle

About We Have Always Lived in the Castle

Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962) is a Gothic novel narrated by Merricat Blackwood, who lives in isolation with her sister Constance and Uncle Julian after most of their family died of arsenic poisoning at dinner six years earlier. Told through Merricat's strange, obsessive, and unreliable voice, the novel is about exclusion, female power, and the violence done to those who refuse to conform — widely considered Jackson's masterpiece and one of the great American novels of the twentieth century.