Read-along – Hill House (2 of 3)
Chapters 4 & 5 – and The Everett Mansion
So the haunting has begun . . . How did you find these central chapters? Here are my thoughts:
I look forward to discussing the final section of the book next week!
In the meantime, let me tell you more about the Everett Mansion. In October last year, I had the privilege of visiting Shirley Jackson’s home town of North Bennington, in Southern Vermont, with her biographer, Ruth Franklin.
We were recording two episodes for the Penguin Classics podcast: one about The Haunting of Hill House and one about We Have Always Lived in the Castle. For the Hill House episode, we got access to the Everett Mansion: a derelict mansion a short drive from Bennington, which had – and still has – a reputation for being haunted.
The mansion was built in the 1910s by Edward Hamlin Everett, a wealthy glass bottle manufacturer. After his death it became the subject of a contentious legal dispute between his daughters and his second wife. In Jackson’s time it was used by the Holy Cross Congregation and later became part of the campus of Southern Vermont College; by the time we visited it was deserted. It is said to be haunted by the ghost of Everett’s first wife, a woman dressed in white who wanders the grounds.
Ruth had a hunch that the Everett Mansion was the model for Hill House: in her biography, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life, she notes that ‘a picture of the mansion, suitably foreboding, is in Jackson’s files.’
The situation is certainly very like that of Hill House. It is 200 miles from New York, set amidst looming green hills. It has a gate, a tower, a forbidding front door and a veranda that runs all the way around ‘like a very tight belt’. Inside there are big rooms, long corridors, wood panelling, grand staircases and details of sinister cherubs . . .
The most convincing thing of all was the feeling we had when we were inside. Like Hill House, the angles were ‘all wrong’. It was a very confusing building to explore. It’s hard to capture in the photographs, but the staircases were at acute angles, the corridors were curved, there were different levels and unexpected connections between rooms. Whether or not it was a direct inspiration behind Jackson’s novel, the Everett Mansion is certainly the most Hill House-like building I’ve ever experienced.
If you’d like to listen to the podcast episode, it has a full description of the house and our experience inside it. It’s 45 minutes long and available for free on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Audible - or whatever podcast platform you prefer. If you do listen, I would love to know what you think!
I can also highly recommend Ruth’s excellent biography of Jackson:
See you all next week for our final discussion of The Haunting of Hill House . . .
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Very much enjoying this re-read. What strikes me, however, is the contrast between the dialogue and the characters' exploration of the house, which almost reads like a comedy of manners, and the sudden revelations of the horrors of the house. It's as if the house itself is intruding on a country house weekend away. The characters themselves could also come from a Golden Era of Detective Fiction set-up, with a kindly, benevolent doctor, a legatee with a shady past, and two women of a very specific type - not to mention the two faithful but taciturn retainers. Of course, we know from Eleanor's back story that she is not from that typecast, as it were, so there's a feeling that they are all to some degree acting out their parts, which all adds to the unsettling, unreal atmosphere. Even now, I still imagine it will all work out fine...
“Whose hand was I holding?”! That gave me full heebie-jeebies!
Such beautiful writing, I could see and feel everything in my mind’s eye - Jackson is a master of setting you right in the atmosphere! I can definitely believe that Everett House was the inspiration- even just on the photo, it gives you a feeling of doom and darkness.
Seeing Eleanor’s dark thoughts come to the forth was disconcerting - it felt so visceral and couldn’t be contained, which made a later scene of blood (?) in Theo’s room doubly creepy!