Shirley Jackson: writing her way out of the housewife box

In June 1948 a brilliantly chilling story appeared in the New Yorker. Shirley Jackson's The Lottery is set in a small American town in which every year the villagers draw lots to determine which one of them the others will stone to death. The story attracted more letters than any other in the magazine's illustrious history, most of them complaints from readers who were left baffled, horrified or both. Nearly 70 years later Jackson's story, with its disquieting details – the lottery winner's toddler son being given his own handful of pebbles to throw has haunted me for years – and perfectly crafted final line, has lost none of its power to shock and disturb.

The Lottery wasn't Jackson's only dark classic: We Have Always Lived in the Castle and The Haunting of Hill House are still regarded as masterpieces, and her fans have ranged from Donna Tartt and Stephen King to Jonathan Lethem and Dorothy Parker (who called Jackson "unparalleled as a leader in the field of beautifully written, quiet, cumulative shudders").

But there were other sides to her writing, all of which are celebrated in an excellent new collection, Let Me Tell You: New Stories, Essays and Other Writing (Penguin Classics, £20), edited by her children Laurence Jackson Hyman and Sarah Hyman DeWitt.

The book includes previously uncollected short fiction, some of it as unnerving as her most famous work. In Paranoia a man's commute home starts to feel like a hunt. Mrs Spencer and the Oberons offers a vision of suburban life as dark and dreamlike as John Cheever's The Swimmer. But much of the collection consists of essays, lectures on the craft of writing, and funny, cheerful tales of family life.

Jackson, who died in 1965 aged 48, was married to the critic and academic Stanley Edgar Hyman, with whom she had four children. Throughout the 1950s she wrote lightly fictionalised women's magazine pieces about life in her lively household, some of which were collected in two successful books, Life Among the Savages and Raising Demons. The new collection features several of these family tales, which show that she was as skilled at conjuring warmth and light as darkness and dread.

Today, when Jackson is mostly remembered for her unsettling novels and short fiction, many readers are surprised to discover this cheerful domestic side. I know I wasn't the first to assume Raising Demons was a very different sort of book. The narrator of these autobiographical stories and many of her essays comes across as a wry housewife, who writes about her family with great wit and affection and without sentimentality.

‘Fallen woman’

But anyone taken aback to find that the author of The Haunting of Hill House also wrote so amusingly about kitchen implements should remember that so-called housewives have always used literature to subvert expectations. Elizabeth Gaskell was a respectable Unitarian minister's wife in Manchester when her novel Ruth shocked Victorian society with its sympathetic depiction of a "fallen woman". Like Jackson's, Gaskell's work crossed literary boundaries: she wrote about village life in Cranford, industrial unrest in Mary Barton and North and South, and complex familial and romantic ties in the wonderful Wives and Daughters. She also wrote many supernatural tales, including The Old Nurses's Story, one of the best ghost stories of the 19th century.

In The Real Me, a darkly comic essay collected in the new book, Shirley Jackson declared: "I am tired of writing dainty little biographical things that pretend I am a trim little housewife." Like Elizabeth Gaskell, there was more to her than that – and Let Me Tell You is a timely reminder that no one, whether housewife, writer or both, fits into a single box.

Anna Carey's latest novel is Rebecca is Always Right (O'Brien)