No doubt many readers who helped to put Miss Jackson's novel on the bestseller lists for a long time read the book … as a mystery or whodunit lacking only a detective to solve the crime….

There is, however, considerably more to We Have Always Lived in the Castle than [this] …; Miss Jackson's novel is, in fact, a finely patterned work whose thematic concern is not really mystery or horror at all. To be sure, there is a conventional mystery of sorts—the identity of the poisoner—but unraveling it could hardly be said to strain our powers of deduction. And there is an element of horror as well, although, strangely enough, it is not caused by our discovery that a twelve-year-old girl has dispatched no fewer than four members of her family …, and has left an uncle crippled for life from the aftereffects of arsenic poisoning. Parricide on...