creativity. She has published essays on Zelda Fitzgerald, Dawn Powell, Shirley Jackson, Sara Haardt, and Estelle Faulkner. In addition to these specialties, her teaching interests include Iranian and Japanese women writers, femmes fatales, and the American gothic.
Lawson applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, On Edge: Gender and Genre in the Work of Shirley Jackson, Patricia Highsmith, and Leigh Brackett, and reported the following:
From page 99:Learn more about On Edge at the Ohio State University Press website....very first issue (Letters 255) and thus before she considered publishing there. Highsmith’s path to publishing works of science fiction was different. Even before The Price of Salt became a lesbian classic in its pulp form, Highsmith already had a familiarity with this side of the publishing industry because her first job as a writer was in comic books. Starting in 1943 and continuing for about six years, she worked first at Michael Publishers, where she wrote text for biographical comics on real-life personages, and then at Fawcett, where she wrote scripts for superhero characters like Pyroman and Captain Midnight (A. Wilson 94–95). Though in her journals Highsmith contrasted pulp fiction to “fine writing” and deemed it “nonsense-taken-seriously” (Patricia 320), Susannah Clapp argues comics were an ideal medium for her, because “her language is not self-consciously elegant. The syntax isn’t supple. She isn’t discursive or elaborate” (97). Though Brackett’s writing proves that science fiction could, in fact, include ornate and beautifully written prose, the genre also commonly made use of the more stripped-down style for which Highsmith became known. Similarly, Noel Mawer has described an overarching pattern in Highsmith’s writing in which “fantasy can be ‘truth,’ can be preferable to reality (or simply necessary); it is all that matters to some people, and may lead them anywhere” (63), an ethos that was also popular among writers of the speculative genres.The Page 99 Test is a fairly useful way to get a clear sense of my approach and argument in my book. It falls in Chapter 4, which is about the science fiction writing that these authors did (when only Brackett is usually credited with writing in the genre). This page happens to touch briefly on all three authors I cover, and it also shows how I explore the intersections between the usually strictly delineated genres: in this case the connection between the gothic and science fiction.
The influence of the gothic on science fiction is another useful point of intersection within the diverse range of work all three authors produced. According to Aldiss, “The methods of the Gothic writers are those of many science fiction authors, particularly the magazine contributors of the nineteen-thirties, -forties, and -fifties” because these writers “brought the principle of horrid revelation to a fine art, while the distant and unearthly are frequently part of the same package” (19). Sarah Lefanu has likewise connected women’s sci-fi to Ellen Moers’s influential concept of the female gothic, arguing that both offer “strong-minded heroines” as well as a way to “challenge dominant literary conventions and to produce a literature that can be at once subversive and popular” (25). Though some variations of the speculative genres took a more optimistic approach, all three of these writers were attracted to the end of the spectrum that used the genre as a means of illustrating the darker side of human nature and our tendencies toward self-destruction.
Though Jackson biographer Ruth Franklin has claimed that author wrote “only one published story that truly qualifies as science fiction” (384), she in fact published five pieces in science fiction venues between 1953 and 1958, and these stories should be read according to this generic background. The piece that is commonly cited as an indisputable work of sci-fi, likely because it is so different from anything else that Jackson wrote, is her story “Bulletin”...
--Marshal Zeringue
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