Treasures found in Shirley Jackson's bottom drawer

Shirley Jackson is "perhaps best known" (an invidious phrase, to say the least) for her story The Lottery, in which a bunch of crusty New Englanders hold an annual ritual whereby one of their own is "sacrificed" for the harvest.

The point of the story was that this took place not in the era of witch-burning, but now. It was hardly heart-rending, but a transgressive attack on the traditional, tricksy-poo short story, and the reading public of 1948 was outraged. She got hate mail, if you can imagine that.

The Lottery decided everyone that the macabre was Jackson’s bailiwick. In The Real Me, she mischievously notes, “My most interesting experience was with a young woman who offended me and who subsequently fell down an elevator shaft and broke all the bones in her body except one, and I didn’t know that one was there.”

But from the range of styles and subject matter in Let Me Tell You, she emerges as an agile, witty, very worldly writer. This book is the result of some literary housekeeping by her heirs, an introduction to Jackson’s bottom desk drawer. Well, that is some desk and some bottom drawer.

You could say these stories are all about what it was like to be a woman in America in the 20th century: panicky. Jackson came from a "well-to-do" background, and she was good at noticing things, especially things that bedevil the well-to-do.

She’s excellent on neurotic matrons, social slights and the oppressive manias of housekeeping. Lots of the characters steal or lie, out of spite or unhappiness or just monomania. They can’t help themselves testing the limits of things. She’s also an excellent limner of dark, vaguely threatening little grocery stores.

In a superb story, Mrs Spencer And The Oberons, a banker’s wife gets an annoying message from her very annoying sister about a couple moving to her town, whom she simply must meet.

She can’t be bothered with these people, but the more she tries to high-hat them and belittle them and tell everyone they’re of no consequence, the more power they gain over her and her family.

In the end she’s wandering around in the dark, hearing faint sounds from an unfindable picnic, her own town unrecognisable, ruining her shoes and damning to hell these people she’s never even laid eyes on.

When she’s finally reunited with her husband and children, she can barely communicate with them because of the exquisite horrors she’s experienced. It’s scary and sad. And it’s also hilarious – a masterclass in hysteria.

There’s a group of stories about women and soldiers in the Second World War. Jackson was just starting to write at this time, but these are assured in their off-beat vision, with something of the deranged small-town atmospheres of Patricia Highsmith’s work, or in Hitchcock’s Shadow Of A Doubt.

A drunk man comes into a bar where war-effort shift workers are drinking beer and begins to lecture one of the women as if she’s his own wayward daughter. A mother tries to keep her wiggling toddlers arranged together on the sofa, a "picture" for Daddy to behold when he walks in the front door from overseas.

One man ("4-F", unfit for service) arranges an evening with a number of women, thinking it’s going to be his lucky day. He’s roaring to be their party animal. It turns out, of course, that they can only hate him.

In Jackson’s prose there are hints of Salinger, and of Sally Benson, who wrote the famous Junior Miss stories. Jackson wrote for the "slick" publications of the time, to some extent in a "magazine language" these writers shared. It brings you up short now, the improbable, surface ease of this vanished world, as Jackson herself says, “a montage of sailboats, country club dances, expensive evening gowns, and good scotch.”

Who knows – perhaps it vanished partly because this tone of voice did too? There are also experiments in what Raymond Carver set out to do, and in her bitter whimsy and elusive, self-mocking line drawings, a deal of Stevie Smith.

Let Me Tell You includes some of Jackson’s casual journalism, humorous pieces that don’t give away much, although there are hints that her frustrations with domesticity were just about double everyone else’s.

In On Girls Of Thirteen, Jackson despairs of the groupthink that controls her daughter’s life: “From the time my daughter gets up in the morning to brush her hair the same number of times that Carole up the street is brushing her hair to the time she turns off her radio at night after listening to the same program that Cheryl three blocks away is listening to, her life is controlled, possessed, by a shifting set of laws that make your garden-variety savage initiation rite look like milk time in the nursery school.”

In some of these autobiographical scraps and abandoned stories Jackson plays with her haunted house ideas. Things eerily disappear and reappear in her own home, she would have us believe. Her husband gives her a box of photographs of old houses, and in the windows of one chateau, there are sometimes two people to be seen, and sometimes not.

Her husband was Stanley Edgar Hyman, a famous book reviewer, and she’s very amusing about that, and quite damning about the three words he used in every single review he ever wrote. They were, uh, invidious, heart-rending and bailiwick.

Let Me Tell You by Shirley Jackson is published by Penguin Classics, £20