Bennington College

Bennington College enters the account as a nearby institution whose presence helped define the social tensions surrounding Shirley Jackson’s long residence in North Bennington. The text links local hostility toward the college with the villagers’ anti-intellectualism and with the pressures that shaped Jackson’s writing.

Setting and Association

Literary critic Stanley Edgar Hyman taught at Bennington College, while Jackson lived in North Bennington for most of her adult life as his faculty wife. The account places the college close to the village but does not specify its internal organization, programs, or activities; its relevance here is its connection to Jackson’s household and to the town’s response to the college.

Local Tensions and Literary Context

The villagers’ hostility toward Bennington College is described as an expression of both anti-intellectualism and reflexive anti-Semitism. That antagonism formed part of the social environment Jackson encountered as an eccentric newcomer. The account presents the hostility as influential in her art, while also noting a reciprocal movement: the village’s treatment of Jackson helped shape her writing, and her writing in turn fed the local legend surrounding her. Bennington College is thus part of the setting for a broader conflict between the college and an insular community, rather than the subject of a separate institutional history.