The characters in Shirley Jackson's Hill House - which one is like the author?

As the 4 characters who are visiting Hill House to see if there is any evidence that the place is, as legend has it, haunted settle in for the weekend, we get a long section in which the man who's brought them together, Dr. Montague, gives us the back story on the house and the families who lived (and died) there. Nothing special, really - just a lot of back story, and as Dr M says all these old Victorian mansions had witnessed a lot of deaths - people died younger, and at home, back in those days. The main point that Shirley Jackson is working (in The Haunting of Hill House) is the development of the character who is the general focus of the story, though it's told in "close" third person: Eleanor. She seems by far the most emotionally fragile and must suggestible, the one most likely to see, hear, or imagine the presence of spirits, or to fall the victim of a hoax, if that's what this "experiment" is about. What's particularly striking to readers who know anything about Jackson's work is how close Eleanore seems to the author, who felt always like a shunned outsider in her small Vermont academic town; we see much of that in Eleanore. She seems to enjoy, at first at least, the companionship of three others in this social experiment, but there's also something too clingy and dependent in her attitude, and there's something bizarre and childish in how she even arrived at the house - more or less purloining her sister's car - and in her weird ride in her ability to make this long drive by herself. She acts in many ways like a child, and we sense that she is extremely sensitive to disapproval and judgment and that she is fragile and unstable - an unsuitable participant in this social experiment that would seem to require cool dispassion and skepticism among the observers. Overall, I can't imagine why anyone would agree to participate in this experiment, led by a "Dr" about whom they know nothing - but that may be part of the point: Only the insecure (Eleanor), the egotistic (Theodora), or the oblivious (the nephew of the house owner) would come aboard.