Our opening song, “Maid Freed from the Gallows” performed by John Jacob Niles
- An old folksong that has a bunch of different names: “Gallis Pole” “Hangman’s Tree” “The Prickle Holly Bush” “Gallow’s Pole” (Led Zepplin)
- Details a young person, often a women, who is about to be hung. Different people come, traditionally her father and then her mother, and she asks if they’ve brought gold to pay off the hangman, but they have just come to watch her die. Finally, their true love arrives in time with the gold.
The edition of Hangsamanwe’re using.
Journal of SJ studies: Kelly’s paper will be coming out in the Winter edition!
Hugh Wheeler: script writer for We Have Always Lived in the Castle play
- “INTERVIEWER: You were encouraged to write by your family? JACKSON: They couldn’t stop me. —New York Post, September 30, 1962” (21)
- “The renowned cookbook author Julia Child and her husband, Paul, who had met Shirley the previous summer at Bread Loaf and remembered her ‘wonderful talent’ and ‘warm and wonderful personality.’” (477)
Donna Tartt’s The Secret History
- Refrain from The Haunting of Hill House, as discussed last season
Susan Behrans essay: “The Essential Self of Natalie Waite in Hangsaman by Shirley Jackson”
“Often father and daughter look down on mother (woman) together. They exchange meaningful glances when she misses a point. They agree that she is not bright as they are, cannot reason as they do. This collusion does not save the daughter from the mother’s fate.”
― Bonnie Burstow, Radical Feminist Therapy: Working in the Context of Violence
reading shirley jackson:the podcast 