Rarely seen Shirley Jackson story finally sees the light of day

Shirley Jackson resisted calling herself a feminist, but 'Adventure On A Bad Night' captures the ongoing tension of a woman coping in a male world. Photo: Handout

Laurence Hyman, son of the late Shirley Jackson, has been on a quest for more than 20 years.

Jackson was just 48 when she died, in 1965, and left behind an extensive backlog of unreleased material. Her husband, the literary critic Stanley Edgar Hyman, made little effort to organise her papers beyond giving them to the Library of Congress, so Hyman and his sister, Sarah Hyman DeWitt, took on the job. They have made several trips to Washington, sorting through boxes and sometimes finding sections of a given work in different piles, a process especially time consuming because Shirley Jackson rarely dated her manuscripts.