Through a downright frightening revitalization of the old Gothic haunted house story, Jackson develops in this novel her interests in humanity's troubled inner life and her critique of some of the negative sides of human group behavior.

Characteristically, Jackson's main emphasis is on how evil forces bear down on one individual — in this novel, this victim is Eleanor Vance, the protagonist. The premise of the novel is so arranged that all the evils and deprivations of Eleanor's life come to her through haunted Hill House, with the terrible process culminating in her suicide. Eleanor, very sensitive and very repressed as the action of the novel opens, is an extremely isolated, mother-dominated woman in her early thirties, a victim of her environment in many ways. When Dr. Montague, an anthropologist ghost-hunter, rents a summer house and recruits a party to live there and look for spirit...