We Have Always Lived in the Castle

Shirley Jackson, an American writer, published the psychological horror novel We Have Always Lived in the Castle in 1962. It was her last novel, and it is narrated by eighteen-year-old Mary Katherine Blackwood, who calls herself Merricat.

Merricat shares the house with Constance, her older sister, and Uncle Julian, who is ailing; the estate it stands on lies outside a small village. Constance has not left the house in six years and will go no further than her garden, while Uncle Julian, who uses a wheelchair, spends his days writing and rewriting his memoirs.

Six years earlier the Blackwood family suffered a tragedy that killed most of them and left the three survivors cut off from the village, which has neither forgotten nor forgiven them. Merricat and Constance keep to a strict routine of small tasks and private superstitions that holds the household together.

Then a cousin, Charles, arrives expecting to be welcomed, and the arrangement the three of them have built starts to come apart. Jackson keeps the whole novel in Merricat's voice, so the reader sees the household only as she chooses to explain it, and she leaves the question of what really happened at the family table deliberately open.