We Have Always Lived in the Castle

On the 2026 VCE English and EAL text list, final year. We Have Always Lived in the Castle is a List 1 novel for Reading and responding to texts. 2026 is its fourth year on the list and it is not on the 2027 list, so this is the last year it can be examined. VCAA's reference edition is Penguin Classics (2009). In 2025, 12 per cent of students wrote on it in Section A.

The novel in brief

Eighteen-year-old Mary Katherine Blackwood, known as Merricat, lives with her older sister Constance and their elderly Uncle Julian in the family house outside a hostile village. Six years earlier, arsenic in the sugar bowl at a family dinner killed the girls' parents, their younger brother Thomas and Julian's wife Dorothy; Julian survived but was left frail and confused and uses a wheelchair. Merricat had been sent to bed without dinner. Constance, who did not take sugar, was tried for the murders and acquitted, but the village still believes she did it. Since then Constance has not gone beyond the garden, and Merricat makes the twice-weekly trip to the village for groceries and library books, enduring taunts and a children's rhyme about the poisoning.

Merricat protects the household with private magic: objects buried on the grounds, things nailed to trees, three chosen magic words. When a book she nailed to a tree falls, she reads it as a sign that change is coming. Change arrives as Cousin Charles, who moves into her dead father's room, courts Constance's trust and shows a clear interest in the family money kept in the safe. Constance begins to consider rejoining the world. Merricat wages a campaign against him and finally tips his lit pipe into a wastebasket of newspapers. The fire destroys the upper floor. After the firemen put it out, the villagers, led when the fire chief Jim Donell throws a rock through a window, pour into the house and smash it while chanting the rhyme. Uncle Julian dies during the night. In the aftermath, Merricat admits that she put the arsenic in the sugar, and Constance tells her she has always known.

The sisters shut themselves into what remains of the house, block the windows and live in a few rooms. The ashamed villagers begin leaving food and notes of apology on the doorstep, while children tell stories about the sisters. Charles returns with a man who wants photographs; the sisters ignore him. Merricat ends the novel declaring them happy.

Author and context

Shirley Jackson (1916 to 1965) was an American writer best known for the short story "The Lottery" (1948), which provoked a storm of angry letters when it appeared in The New Yorker, and for the novel The Haunting of Hill House (1959). We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962) was the last novel she completed. Jackson lived for many years in North Bennington, Vermont, where her husband taught at Bennington College, and her biographers describe the family's uneasy relationship with the local community. In her later years she suffered from severe anxiety and agoraphobia.

Contextual points worth using:

• Post-war America and conformity. The novel appeared in an era that prized suburban normality, domestic femininity and community consensus. The village's hostility to the eccentric, wealthy, isolated Blackwoods reads as a study of how communities police difference.
• Women and the home. Constance's cooking, gardening and generations of preserves in the cellar connect her to the Blackwood women before her. Jackson turns the idealised 1950s home into both a sanctuary and a fortress.
• Gothic tradition. The isolated house, family secrets, a murder in the past, an intruder and a burning house all draw on the Gothic, but Jackson places them in an ordinary small town.
• Mob behaviour. Like "The Lottery", the novel shows ordinary people turning on others once a crowd gives them permission.

Form and structure

• First-person, unreliable narration. Merricat narrates in the past tense, looking back on events. She controls what we know: she describes the poisoning without naming the poisoner, and the truth is only stated late in the novel. Readers who reread find the clues everywhere: her fantasies of villagers dying, her rituals, her anger at anything that threatens the household.
• Ten chapters in three movements. The opening chapters establish the routines of the house and the hostility of the village (the trip to town in chapter 1, the tea visit from Helen Clarke and Lucille Wright, Julian's endless retelling of the poisoning). The middle chapters stage the invasion by Charles and Merricat's escalating counterattack. The fire and the mob (chapter 8) are the climax, and the final chapters show the sisters' new, enclosed life.
• Repetition and ritual. Merricat's days are structured by routines (the twice-weekly village trip, meals, her checks on her safeguards). The rhyme recurs in the village and returns during the destruction of the house, so the children's taunt becomes the voice of the mob.
• Circular ending. The novel begins with Merricat telling us who she is and where she lives, and ends with the sisters more enclosed than ever and, Merricat insists, happy. Whether that is resolution or entrapment is the key interpretive question.

Key characters

• Merricat (Mary Katherine Blackwood). Narrator, eighteen but often childlike, fiercely devoted to Constance and violent in fantasy and in fact. She imagines living on the moon, a place of perfect safety. Her magic is a way of controlling a world that has already been violently changed, and her hostility to change drives the plot.
• Constance Blackwood. Twenty-eight, gentle, domestic, loved by Merricat and blamed by the village. She has protected Merricat's secret for six years. Charles's arrival tempts her to think about rejoining the world, which Merricat experiences as betrayal. Her choice at the end to stay with Merricat is the novel's final statement about loyalty.
• Uncle Julian. Survivor of the poisoning, obsessively documenting that night for a book he will never finish. His confusion about the past (he believes, for example, that Merricat died years ago) makes him another unreliable source. He offers a comic, pathetic counterpoint to the tragedy.
• Charles Blackwood. A cousin who arrives uninvited, occupies the dead father's room and takes a close interest in the family money. He talks about normal life and responsibility, but his behaviour during the fire exposes his greed.
• The villagers. Jim Donell and the men at Stella's coffee shop, the Harris boys, the children with their rhyme. They are hostile as individuals, murderous as a crowd and guilty afterwards. Helen Clarke, who insists on visiting and wants Constance to return to society, shows a politer form of pressure to conform.
• Jonas. Merricat's cat and companion, part of her private world.

Ideas, concerns and values, and how they are built

Persecution and the crowd

The village is hostile from the first chapter: Merricat is watched, mocked and made to feel like prey. Jackson builds this through Merricat's hyper-alert narration and her imagined game of moving safely through the town. The fire scene shows what that hostility becomes when a crowd forms and someone in authority gives permission. The villagers' later offerings of food show guilt without real change: they still turn the sisters into a legend to frighten children.

Isolation as safety and as prison

The fence, the locked gate, the closed path and later the boarded windows make the house a fortress. For Merricat this is paradise; for Constance it was once a refuge and becomes, arguably, a cage. Strong essays hold both readings.

Truth and concealment

The central fact of the novel is withheld from the reader and from the village, and the village's certainty about Constance is wrong. Julian's obsessive, unreliable record-keeping shows how the past is reconstructed as story. The ending turns the sisters into rumour and myth. Topics on truth often invite you to argue that the novel cares less about the facts than about who controls the story.

Change

Every threat in the novel is a threat of change: Constance's hints of leaving, the fallen book, Charles's arrival. Merricat's magic and violence are defences against change, and the novel's ending is a triumph of stasis. Ask what the novel suggests about the cost of refusing change.

Sisterhood and dependence

The sisters' bond is the novel's emotional centre. It is protective, loving and deeply unhealthy at once: Constance has sheltered a murderer; Merricat keeps Constance by driving the world away.

Gender, money and the home

The Blackwood women's domestic tradition (preserves, meals, the house itself) is set against men who want the house's wealth (Charles) or who lead its destruction (Jim Donell). The final image of the sisters wearing tablecloths and Julian's clothes, living in the ruins, strips domesticity down to survival.

Key scenes and why they matter

1. The trip to the village (chapter 1). Establishes Merricat's voice, the village's hostility, her violent fantasies and the rhyme.
2. The tea visit (early chapters). Helen Clarke and Lucille Wright call; Julian relishes retelling the poisoning. The scene reveals how the past is performed as a story and how society pressures Constance to return.
3. The fallen book and the magic words. Merricat's protective system fails and she chooses new charms, marking the start of the threat.
4. Charles's arrival and occupation. He takes the father's room and the father's things, and Merricat's campaign against him begins.
5. The fire and the mob (chapter 8). The climax. Charles's greed, the firemen's switch from rescuers to attackers, the chanting crowd and Julian's death.
6. The admission. After the fire, Merricat states that she put the arsenic in the sugar and Constance says she knew. The reader's understanding of the whole novel shifts.
7. The new life (final chapters). The sisters in the ruined house, the villagers' food offerings, Charles's return with a photographer, and Merricat's final declaration of happiness.

Language and narrative features to name

Unreliable first-person narration; retrospective narration; withholding and delayed revelation; dramatic irony on rereading; the Gothic house; symbolism (the house as castle, the moon, the fence and gate, the sugar bowl, the preserves); ritual and repetition; the children's rhyme as refrain; the crowd as a collective character; black comedy (Julian's commentary); the circular ending.

How VCAA frames topics on this text

VCAA's 2024 and 2025 exam reports describe three topic types: a proposition followed by Discuss, Do you agree? or To what extent do you agree?; a quotation from the text followed by a proposition or question; and a direct question. Each text gets two narrow topics about specific ideas and values.

In 2025, one topic opened with a line from the novel about being forced to invent and imagine, then proposed that truth is of little importance in the novel's world; the other proposed that change is unwelcome in the novel. Expect topics on truth and storytelling, change and stasis, persecution and the village, isolation, the sisters' relationship, power and control, and whether the ending is happy.

Practice topics (original, not from VCAA)

These are practice topics written for this page in the VCAA style. They are not past exam topics.

1. In We Have Always Lived in the Castle, the villagers are more dangerous than Merricat. Do you agree?
2. How does Jackson use Merricat's narration to shape the reader's sympathies?
3. The ending of We Have Always Lived in the Castle is a victory for the sisters. To what extent do you agree?
4. In We Have Always Lived in the Castle, love and control cannot be separated. Discuss.
5. Jackson suggests that communities need someone to blame. Discuss.

Planning example

Topic (practice)

The ending of We Have Always Lived in the Castle is a victory for the sisters. To what extent do you agree?

Contention

The ending is a victory on Merricat's terms, since the house is sealed, Charles is defeated and the village is humbled, but Jackson frames it as a victory that costs everything the sisters might have become, especially Constance.

Paragraph 1: victory over the village and over Charles

The villagers who destroyed the house now leave food and apologies; Charles returns and is ignored. Analyse how Jackson reverses the power relationship from chapter 1, where Merricat was prey in the village.

Paragraph 2: victory as Merricat's design

The ending fulfils Merricat's fantasy of the moon and her hostility to change. Analyse her narration of the final chapters and the symbolism of the boarded windows and ruined upper floor: the house is now a true castle, and a prison.

Paragraph 3: the cost to Constance

Before the fire Constance was beginning to imagine a life beyond the garden. Analyse her decision after the admission to stay with Merricat and never speak of the poisoning, and her living in Julian's clothes among the ruins. Argue that her loyalty is also a surrender.

Paragraph 4: the story the village tells

The sisters become a legend that frightens children. Argue that the village has not changed, and that the sisters' victory depends on their total separation from the world.

Conclusion

Jackson lets Merricat declare them happy and leaves the reader to judge a happiness built on murder, fear and enclosure.

Common pitfalls

• Treating Merricat as simply evil or simply a victim. Jackson makes her both a murderer and a persecuted girl, and topics reward essays that hold that tension.
• Forgetting the village is a character. Many topics are really about the community.
• Summarising the plot twist. Everyone knows Merricat did it. Analyse how Jackson withholds and reveals it.

Read the novel

We Have Always Lived in the Castle is in copyright, so this page analyses the novel without quoting it. VCAA's reference edition is Penguin Classics (2009), available from your school or local library.

Sources

• VCE English and EAL Text List 2026 and Text List 2027, VCAA.
• VCE English 2025 examination and 2025 examination report, VCAA.
• 2024 VCE English examination report, VCAA.
• VCE English and EAL Study Design (version 1.4), VCAA.