We Have Always Lived In The Castle SPOILERS

Did any of you see the documentary 'Grey Gardens' ? A couple of Kennedy relatives mouldering away in a deteriorating mansion full of cats in the American South. Just the kind of place in which Merrycat and family would live. Very reminiscent of this book.

Also the business of being left food by the sorry villagers.

Her father had a book with a list of people that owed him things, that was one of the things she buried. The brother was said to have his father's 'forceful' personality too. The mother did as she was told, too. Mrs Clarke feels sorry for the girls, and says that Mary Katherine, though troublesome, should still have been treated with love, suggesting she wasn't. Plus Constance has always tended the garden and cooked all meals, despite their being other adults in the house.

I know, there's just so much unsaid which is open for interpretation. The more I think about it the more I wonder what the father was up to. He had issues, possibly some form of mental illness which led to his need to shut his family away. The villagers have always disliked them for whatever reason. I think he was a controlling man who maybe abused Constance and Merricat and bullied his brother Julian.

Merricat clearly mistrusts all men now, so her view of Charles is skewed. She keeps having to remind herself to be kind to Julian when clearly she doesn't want to. She would rather not be around him, which makes me think she hates him for not standing up to her father.

No it didn't burn down but it seemed significant it was mentioned and she wasn't allowed near matches.

Agree with the father theory there was possibly something there. Much is made of Charles looking like their father and being a 'ghost'. The father seems controlling in Julian's title bursts of information, and Constance doesn't seem unsympathetic toward Merricat.

I don't think the summer house got burned down though, did it? I remember the mother saying she'd seen a rat there and wouldn't go in, and wanted it burned down but it never was. I'm wondering what it was that really happened in there that led to Merricat refusing to go back there for six years. Was there abuse? It's not mentioned but may be implied that something happened to her in there (her father?) and no one believed her? So she took her revenge.

I loved this book but I don't think she is dead - just that she done it. It reminds me of Christina Rosetti's Goblin Market and the lines
"For there is no friend like a sister
In calm or stormy weather;
To cheer one on the tedious way,
To fetch one if one goes astray,
To lift one if one totters down,
To strengthen whilst one stands”

I read it that Julian slightly believes them all to be dead, including Merricat, due to his dementia, not that they actually are dead...

Charles did seem obsessed by the money, but it could have been distorted by M's point of view I suppose.

Do you think she set fire to the summerhouse? She said she hadn't been there for 6 years (since the murders) and that her mother had said she'd wanted it burned down.

I think she was mentally unwell and the family responded with neglect and coldness (apart from C) and had been planning to ship her off somewhere - there was a remembered argument between her parents with her dad saying they had no choice about something.

And also, as the narration is all from Merricat's point of view which is, at best, very skewed, we cannot ever really say with any certainty what Charles's true motivation was.

Merricat herself liked to play at being the invisible wraith, doer of evil by stealth. Why had she been banned from the dinner table on the night of the poisoning? What had she done?

I really couldn't decide about Charles. Did he want their money? Yes probably but I also thought that he did seem to care for Constance which made Merricat do what she did ti him.

I love Shirley Jackson, a writer whose life was tragically too short, I hate it when you have read and enjoyed everything a writer has written and feel short changed because they died so young.

Poor poor merry cat with her hidden treasures and her secrets and rituals, I know she is unforgivable but I can't help feel sorry for her , well all of them really, locked into those destructive relationships with each other and the outside world. I see they are making a film of whalitc, oh dear, I can not help but feel that it will be a disaster! Jacksons prose seeps into your mind, I don't think it will survive a film script.

She was such a clever writer, mistress of the creepy and psychological but with a light touch for humour as well, try life among the savages, her account of her family life, which sounds delightful, and only makes her inner sad life more poignant.

I thought Charles just wanted the money, and wasn't really interested in Constance at all.

The 'twist' that it was Merricat rather than Constance, isn't really a twist at all. It's pretty obvious right from the opening, when she says she likes deaths head mushrooms.

For a while I thought they were all dead. Then I thought that Merricat was dead. Then I decided that they weren't dead at all but she wanted us to think that they were. Then by the end I decided I didn't really care, as it had all got a bit dull and repetitive and stupid by then.

Yy to mermaid & dinosaurs

No not dead - merricat did it, Julian thinks of her as dead always made me think that he knew at some level.

I assumed Julian had dementia or that he was so badly affected by the poisoning that it has destroyed his memory of what happened.

Merricat is not dead. I realised quite early on that she was the real culprit not Constance and has always had some form of mental illness. Charles has worked it out and wants to remove Constance from her clutches.

The family have always been seen as a bit strange or aloof, fencing themselves off from the village.

Julian says she died in the orphanage of neglect, doesn't he?

More likely that Charles and the villagers have imagined Merricat, or that Uncle Julian has blocked her out? She is often in a doorway, behind a door etc when Julian is around.

I thought it was Merricat wot done it
And is not dead
But might be metaphorically dead to bonkers Julian who she did after all poison?

The 'twist' (though it is more an obvious accumulation of evidence than a twist) is that it was Merricat and not Constance (as a lot of people still think) and also that Constance knew this all along but has been protecting her. Isn't it?

Sorry for the delay, the villagers were taunting me again...