“The Daemon Lover” is the kind of story I’ll always want to rewrite in my head, giving it an ending where the protagonist tells the policeman, the porter and the newsdealer “well, screw Jamie Harris and screw you too”. She then goes home and greatly enjoys having a cup of coffee on her own while reading the newspaper or a good book, before getting ready to go out with her friends in the evening. However, I appreciate that Jackson is writing about a world where such a simple, ordinary possibility is outside the imagining of a large portion of the world. This world is one where “chronically unmarried women have long endured the injustice of being set aside, ignored, dismissed, made invisible”. Defiance, small or large, is far more difficult in isolation, and “The Daemon Lover” is powerful because it shows us how patriarchy can get inside our heads and relentlessly assault our sense of worth.