LRB Screen returns to the Garden Cinema for the final event of its 2024 series, in partnership with MUBI, exploring the art of literary adaptation

Shirley is a striking recent example of that strange and unsettling hybrid form, the largely fictionalised feature about a real person. But the atmosphere that the film conjures around its protagonist, the American horror and mystery writer Shirley Jackson (Elisabeth Moss), is entirely in keeping with her life and work. Renowned for novels and stories that are both highly literary and landmarks of genre fiction, many of which have been ‘rediscovered’ and reissued in recent years, Jackson was a singular character who had to negotiate a complex family life and numerous health problems alongside her successful and controversial career as a writer.

Shirley, an adaptation of the novel of the same name by Susan Scarf Merrell, examines the period around the writing of Jackson’s second novel, Hangsaman. Provoking complex responses on its release, the film ‘is far from a traditional biopic, instead playing on the horror tropes of Jackson’s own work to lure viewers inside the author’s brilliant but troubled mind’ (Harper’s Bazaar).

Responding to the film’s portrayal of Shirley Jackson and its treatment of her life and writings will be the great American novelist Joyce Carol Oates, who edited the Library of America edition of Jackson’s novels and stories. She’ll be joining by video link after the screening for a conversation and Q&A that will also refer to adaptations of her own novels. The evening will be introduced and hosted, as ever, by Gareth Evans.

Cast:
Elisabeth Moss, Odessa Young, Michael Stuhlbarg