Hi guys, Dane here and welcome to another episode of Five Bookish Facts. Today we're going to be looking at five facts about Shirley Jackson and yes this is the only thing of hers that I've read but it'll do. Alright let's go. Guys Dane here and welcome to another episode of Five Bookish Facts. Today we're taking a look at five facts about Shirley Jackson and this was requested by Sue's book nook so thank you Sue. Without further ado let's go. So fact number one is that Jackson had a huge library of witchcraft books. She actually got interested in it in her early years at college and pretty much studied it for the rest of her life. She kind of you can kind of see this influence in a lot of her books including in life among the savages so there are references to historical witchcraft chronicles and manuals that sort of thing. She actually liked to joke about her skills as a witch and spread the rumor that she had caused publisher Alfred A. Knopf to break his leg. She also used to read tarot cards for her friends and family and the copy on the jacket for the road through the wall described to her as perhaps the only contemporary writer who is a practicing amateur witch. Okay fact number two is that despite this she didn't believe in ghosts. I mean she was intrigued by the article she found it really fascinating but she said she never had a supernatural experience. She based the haunting of Hill House which is arguably her most famous book on historical accounts of haunted houses pictures she collected that kind of thing. One of the books that she most admired was an adventure which was an account about two British women of an experience that they had when they accidentally stumbled upon a scene in the past and she was also inspired by accounts of poltergeists. Okay so fact number three is that her famous short story The Lottery was published in the June the 26th 1948 issue of the New Yorker and it actually caused a lot of readers to cancel their subscriptions because they were so angry of it. The country of South Africa banned the story altogether which Jackson thought was a compliment and a lot of people thought that The Lottery was a factual report so she had she received hundreds of letters from New Yorker subscribers who were bewildered full of speculation and some of them just wrote plain old-fashioned abuse. She said she was most alarmed by the letters from people who wanted to know where the Lottery's were still held and whether they could go to watch them. This might sound crazy but actually at the time the New Yorker didn't differentiate between fictitious stories and the you know the genuine stories and quite a lot of the stories inside it kind of fell somewhere between fact and fiction. Pack number four is that she treated her moods as though they were each different persona and she even gave them names so she kept different diaries or with her own style and different unique voice in them but she also did the same with her moods she kept them separate under different personas. It's a lot like her novel The Birds Nest which is a book about a woman's mind which fractures into multiple personalities so in her own mind her moods were distinct and very different. There's a quote here that goes Jackson took the unusual step of assigning names to her moods as if they were characters in a play. There was Irish Jackson's happiest persona and one that her husband would later call her by as a pet name but there was also Harlequin, villain and pan all parts of her that she identified as a different aspect of the composite home. And fact number five is that she was never particularly interested in domestic duties and she enjoyed writing and she described it as the only time I ever get to sit down. So there we go. So there we have it there were five bookish facts about Shirley Jackson don't forget to let me know in the comments if you've got requests for any future episodes hit that like button if you've enjoyed this video hit subscribe for more and I will see you soon for another bookish video. Thanks a lot. Bye bye.