Shirley Jackson is having a moment, and it's a long-awaited, well-deserved one. Once overlooked by the literary establishment, her stories of small-town stonings and haunted hill houses are now getting feature and series-length adaptations. Betty Friedan, who spoke of modern women having “suffered a schizophrenic split” in The Feminine Mystique, too was critical of Shirley. She accused, unjustly, the horror writer of purveying the myth of the happy housewife, while ignoring the reality of the unhappy careerist. The reality was: trying to sync the seemingly incompatible identities of wife and writer had been an enduring struggle for Shirley. That struggle is the subject of Josephine Decker's anti-biopic Shirley.

Elisabeth Moss slips into the skin of the famed horror writer, whose co-dependent relationship with a young woman becomes key to unlocking the next novel from her imagination. The young woman, Rose (Odessa Young), arrives in Vermont with her husband Fred (Logan Lerman), who is to be the new teaching assistant to Shirley's husband Stanley Hyman (Michael Stuhlbarg). When the newlyweds move into their home, Rose finds herself reduced to the role of a maid. A fan of Shirley's writing, she weathers the writer’s initial coldness before turning muse for her story, Hangsaman.