conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What could be a title for a book about Haunting, Hill with the genre: Literature & Fiction, Genre Fiction?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: A title for this book could be 'The Haunting of Hill House'
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: the first four paragraphs for this book. Start with the sentence 'The Haunting of Hill House
  It's striking, for example, that a writer who depicted the sisterly bond with such passion had no sister of her own'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The Haunting of Hill House
  It's striking, for example, that a writer who depicted the sisterly bond with such passion had no sister of her own. Jackson was born, in 1916, to handsome middle-class parents in San Francisco and raised with her younger brother in one of the city's affluent suburbs. To her elegant, conventional mother, Jackson—ungainly, eccentric, brilliant, and plain—was a perennial vexation. The relationship would torment Jackson, too, for the rest of her life. She would alternate between defying her parents (by marrying a Jew, by refusing to live up to her mother's standards of grooming, by becoming fat) and trying to outdo them. In Jackson's letters home, Oppenheimer detects a tireless campaign to camouflage stresses and crises while presenting Jackson's family life as more warm and loving than the one her mother provided. The demanding, cold, and critical mothers who figure in Jackson's fiction, including Eleanor's own dead-but-not-gone parent, owe much to Geraldine Jackson.
  It was a choice that perpetuated her outsider status. Jackson didn't want to be subsumed into the college as a faculty wife, but she didn't fit into old rural New England either. Xenophobic, tight-lipped, and possibly inbred Yankee country folk begin to make appearances in her fiction at this point. A small town in Vermont is the setting for "The Lottery," and the town square where the locals gather to ritually stone to death one of their citizens was based on the square in North Bennington. Jackson told one friend the story was about anti-Semitism, a prejudice she felt keenly in North Bennington, but it's likely that she would have been excluded even if her husband had been a WASP. North Bennington was the kind of place where you were considered a newcomer unless your grandfather had been born there.
  Along the way Eleanor weaves the landmarks she sees into a running fantasy life that, besides a kind of smothered rage, we soon recognize to be one of her chief traits. She sees a pair of stone lions and imagines herself the chatelaine of a fine house, respected in the town, sipping elderberry wine, looked after by "a little dainty old lady." A stand of oleander trees prompts a fairy tale reverie in which Eleanor plays a long-lost princess, returned at last to the grief-stricken queen and greeted by feasting and the advent of a prince. Finally and most alluring, there is a little cottage, "buried in a garden," where she imagines living all alone, behind a wall of roses and more oleanders, where "no one would ever find me."
  Fragments of these fantasies appear in the lies Eleanor will later tell Theo about her little apartment in the city, like the pieces of everyday life that turn up in dreams. Eleanor's fantasies serve as a bulwark against the actuality of her life, the grim years she spent at the beck and call of a failing, miserable mother and later, at her sister's house, the sad cot in the baby's room. Even after her mother's death, Eleanor has been relegated to the nursery, bossed around and kept on a short leash. Her identification with the likes of Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty makes a certain sense; she's had an unloving family who consigned her to menial labor and refused to let her grow up. Eleanor is drifting in and out of a dream state even before she arrives at Hill House, endlessly taking apart and reassembling bits of fantasy and experience to fashion the imagined life she hopes eventually to live.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: four more paragraphs
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Eleanor turned abruptly and went back to the veranda. "I wonder if she had Dudley cut extra doors for her. I wonder how she likes working in a kitchen where a door in back of her might open without her knowing it. I wonder, actually, just what Mrs. Dudley is in the habit of meeting in her kitchen so that she wants to make sure that she'll find a way out no matter which direction she runs. I wonder—"
  The doctor sighed and moved his shoulders tiredly. "After my vigil last night, I feel the need of a rest this afternoon, and you," he said to Eleanor, "would do well to lie down for an hour. Perhaps a regular afternoon rest might be more comfortable for all of us."
  Eleanor did not sleep during the afternoon, although she would have liked to; instead, she lay on Theodora's bed in the green room and watched Theodora do her nails, chatting lazily, unwilling to let herself perceive that she had followed Theodora into the green room because she had not dared to be alone.
  Eleanor moved comfortably. "Gold paint," she suggested, hardly thinking. With her eyes almost closed she could see Theodora only as a mass of color sitting on the floor.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: the last five paragraphs. End with the sentence ' Within, its walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Eleanor closed her eyes and sighed, feeling and hearing and smelling the house; a flowering bush beyond the kitchen was heavy with scent, and the water in the brook moved sparkling over the stones. Far away, upstairs, perhaps in the nursery, a little eddy of wind gathered itself and swept along the floor, carrying dust. In the library the iron stairway swayed, and light glittered on the marble eyes of Hugh Crain; Theodora's yellow shirt hung neat and unstained, Mrs. Dudley was setting the lunch table for five. Hill House watched, arrogant and patient. "I won't go away," Eleanor said up to the high windows.
  Eleanor laughed, and turned, holding out her hand. "Luke," she said, and he came toward her, silent. "Thank you for bringing me down last night," she said. "That was wrong of me. I know it now, and you were very brave."
  Then Eleanor, her hand on the door of the car, stopped and turned. "Theo?" she said inquiringly, and Theodora ran down the steps to her.
  With what she perceived as quick cleverness she pressed her foot down hard on the accelerator; they can't run fast enough to catch me this time, she thought, but by now they must be beginning to realize; I wonder who notices first? Luke, almost certainly. I can hear them calling now, she thought, and the little footsteps running through Hill House and the soft sound of the hills pressing closer. I am really doing it, she thought, turning the wheel to send the car directly at the great tree at the curve of the driveway, I am really doing it, I am doing this all by myself, now, at last; this is me, I am really really really doing it by myself.
  Mrs. Sanderson was enormously relieved to hear that Dr. Montague and his party had left Hill House; she would have turned them out, she told the family lawyer, if Dr. Montague had shown any sign of wanting to stay. Theodora's friend, mollified and contrite, was delighted to see Theodora back so soon; Luke took himself off to Paris, where his aunt fervently hoped he would stay for a while. Dr. Montague finally retired from active scholarly pursuits after the cool, almost contemptuous reception of his preliminary article analyzing the psychic phenomena of Hill House. Hill House itself, not sane, stood against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, its walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.