Great-great-granddaughter Quotes

As the subtitles of Jackson's biographies echo each other-demons, haunted-so both biographies present a near-identical portrait of her as daughter, wife, mother, writer: these roles inextricably knotted together through Jackson's adult life, often to the point of near-unbearable pressure and stress. Jackson's patrician, socially conscious, and woundingly censorious mother, Geraldine Bugbee, was the great-great-granddaughter of a wealthy San Francisco architect; clearly the model for the nightmare mother-figures in Jackson's fiction, particularly the embittered invalid-mother of Hill House, Geraldine persisted in criticizing and belittling Jackson long after she had acquired national renown as a writer. (Shirley Jackson)