"Louisa, Please Come Home" is a short story by Shirley Jackson first published in 1960 in May's edition of Ladies Home Journal entitled "Louisa, Please". [1] [2] It has since been reprinted in the collections Come Along with Me (1968), [3] Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives (edited by Sarah Weinman, 2013) [4] and Dark Tales (2016).
The story often appears as set work in high school English classes. [5]
Biographers believe this short story — along with "The Missing Girl" — is inspired by the seven people who disappeared in the woods around Bennington, Vermont between 1945 and 1950, near where Shirley Jackson lived from 1945 until her death. [1]
Set in the 1950s, 19-year-old Louisa Tether [6] leaves her Rockville family home the day before her sister Carol's wedding. She had been planning to leave for a while, and had put a lot of thought into her disappearance. She travels on a bus and a train before arriving at Chandler, one of the biggest cities in the state, where she blends in as an average girl, taking up the false identity of "Lois Taylor". Louisa finds a nice room in a rooming house, befriending its owner, Mrs. Peacock, and while intending to sign up for a secretary course, she winds up getting a good job at a stationery store instead. On the anniversary of her disappearance, she hears her mother's voice on the radio, asking her to return home. Three years after leaving home, Louisa encounters Paul, a neighbor from Rockville, in Chandler. Paul persuades her to come back home so that he may claim the reward being offered for finding her, but when they return to Rockville, her family does not believe her; Paul had already tried to claim that two girls were their daughter before. Looking around in her former home, Louisa begins to realize that she wants to stay, but with Paul unable to convince her family, she leaves to return to Chandler, giving Paul the money her parents had given her as travel fare. The story ends with Louisa mentioning that her mother still calls out for her on the radio every year on the anniversary of her running away.
The story contains two themes: showing that people do not appreciate what they have until they have lost it and also that people may know you but do not see the real you. [6]
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"Bennington Triangle" is a phrase coined by American author Joseph A. Citro to denote an area of southwestern Vermont within which a number of people went missing between 1945 and 1950. This was further popularized in two books, including Shadow Child, in which Citro devoted chapters to discussion of these disappearances and various items of folklore surrounding the area. According to Citro, the area shares characteristics with the Bridgewater Triangle in Southeastern Massachusetts.
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Going to Meet the Man, published in 1965, is a collection of eight short stories by American writer James Baldwin. The book, dedicated "for Beauford Delaney", covers many topics related to anti-Black racism in American society, as well as African-American–Jewish relations, childhood, the creative process, criminal justice, drug addiction, family relationships, jazz, lynching, sexuality, and white supremacy.
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Come Along with Me is a posthumous collection of works by American writer Shirley Jackson. It contains the incomplete titular novel, on which Jackson was working at the time of her death, three lectures delivered by Jackson, and sixteen short stories, mostly in the gothic genre, including Jackson's best known work, "The Lottery".
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Hangsaman is a 1951 gothic novel by American author Shirley Jackson. The second of Jackson's published novels, Hangsaman is a bildungsroman centering on lonely college freshman Natalie Waite, who descends into madness after enrolling in a liberal arts college.
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