The Sundial

The Sundial is a 1958 novel by author Shirley Jackson.

Plot summary

The Sundial tells the story of the residents of the Halloran house, opening on the evening of the funeral of Lionel Halloran, the house's master. Lionel's wife, Maryjane, is convinced that Lionel was pushed down the stairs and murdered by his mother, Orianna Halloran, who stands to inherit the house; only hours after the funeral, Maryjane taught her young daughter, Fancy, to repeat the phrase "Granny killed my daddy." Also living at Halloran house were the aged Richard Halloran, who needed a wheelchair to move around, and was kept by a nurse; Essex, a young man hired to catalogue the library (and of whom it is implied was more specifically hired to be a kept man to the elder Mrs. Halloran); Fanny, Richard Halloran's sister; and Miss Ogilvie, young Fancy's governess.

A less obvious but nonetheless imposing character in the novel is the Halloran house itself. Built by a man who came into great wealth late in his life, the house is lavish to the point of garishness, and the endless details of the grounds and interiors are carefully described by Jackson until they overwhelm both characters and reader alike. One of these details is the eponymous sundial, which stands like an asymmetrical eyesore in the middle of the mathematically perfect grounds and bears the legend "WHAT IS THIS WORLD?" (a quote from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, in "The Knight's Tale").

Sun

The Sun (in Greek: Helios, in Latin: Sol) is the star at the center of the Solar System and is by far the most important source of energy for life on Earth. It is a nearly perfect spherical ball of hot plasma, with internal convective motion that generates a magnetic field via a dynamo process. Its diameter is about 109 times that of Earth, and it has a mass about 330,000 times that of Earth, accounting for about 99.86% of the total mass of the Solar System.About three quarters of the Sun's mass consists of hydrogen; the rest is mostly helium, with much smaller quantities of heavier elements, including oxygen, carbon, neon and iron.

The Sun is a G-type main-sequence star (G2V) based on spectral class and it is informally referred to as a yellow dwarf. It formed approximately 4.567 billion years ago from the gravitational collapse of matter within a region of a large molecular cloud. Most of this matter gathered in the center, whereas the rest flattened into an orbiting disk that became the Solar System. The central mass became increasingly hot and dense, eventually initiating nuclear fusion in its core. It is thought that almost all stars form by this process.