Louisa, Please Come Home
"Louisa, Please Come Home" is a short story by Shirley Jackson first published in 1960 in May's edition of "Ladies Home Journal" entitled "Louisa, Please". It has since been reprinted in the collections "Come Along with Me" (1968), "Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives" (edited by Sarah Weinman, 2013) and "Dark Tales" (2016). The story often appears as set work in high school English classes. Background. Biographers believe this short story — along with "The Missing Girl" — is inspired by the seven people who disappeared in the woods around Bennington, Vermont between 1945 and 1950, near where Shirley  Jackson grew up. Plot. Set in the 1950s, 19-year-old Louisa Tether left her Rockville family home the day before her sister Carol's wedding. She had been planning to leave for a while, and had had put a lot of thought into her disappearance. She travelled on a bus and a train before arriving at Chandler, one of the biggest cities in the state, where she blended in as nobody recognised her. Louisa then found a nice room in a house and she had intended to sign up to a secretary course but then got a good job  in a stationery store. Every three years on the anniversary of her disappearance she heard he mothers voice on the radio, asking her to return home. Then she saw Paul in Chandler, a neighbour from Rockville who persuaded her to return, to claim the reward as he had found her. But her family did not believe her as Paul had already tried to claim that two girls had been their daughter. Paul and Louisa could not convince them so headed back to Chandler... Themes. The story contains two themes: showing that people do not appreciate what they have until they  have lost it and also that people may know you but do not see the real you.