The Haunting Of Hill House

Published in 1959, The Haunting of Hill House, a Gothic novel by Shirley Jackson, was a 1960 finalist for the National Book Award. The protagonist is Eleanor Vance, a young woman with a troubled past who, along with two other guests, is invited to spend three months in a haunted house to take part in research gathered by Dr. John Montague. Like other Gothic novels, The Haunting of Hill House takes place in an old abandoned mansion and deals with dark family histories, latent desires, suspense, fear, and the supernatural. While highly regarded as a masterful ghost story in its own right, the novel is also an exploration of how the past lingers in the present and of the forces within us that determine our destinies. The supernatural incidents inside Hill House are heavily symbolic and often say as much about the characters as they do about the house. The novel asks whether the heroine’s psychological traumas make her of special interest to the forces of the house or whether she is causing the supernatural events herself. Because the narrative never answers the question, Hill House remains unknowable even at the novel’s end.