Inspiring Older Readers
posted on 01 Jan 2024
The Woman in Black by Susan Hill
In the early-1980s, when the novelist Susan Hill sat down to write the kind of classic ghost story that flourished in the nineteenth century but in the post-war period had gradually fallen out of fashion, she can’t possibly have known that the resulting novella, The Woman in Black, would earn her more than all her previous novels put together. It has also been dramatised for radio, TV and stage (it is the second longest-running play in the West End), and for over a decade has been a GCSE English Literature set text.
The first time I read it I barely did more than skim its pages, primarily to confirm my own prejudices: I thought it was a quick but well-judged money-spinner knocked out between ‘proper’ novels, a clever little pastiche. But I love to read a few ghost stories during the Christmas period and decided to give this one another go. Yet again, I found that my preconceptions were not just wrong but also quite misguided.
I could remember almost nothing about it but I was pleasantly surprised by its immediately atmospheric opening pages. It is Christmas Eve; Arthur Kipps, a retired solicitor, old before his time and it seems a rather melancholy man, is with his wife and family in his house in the country. He has reached some kind of crisis point but we don’t know the cause. He decides that he will at last attempt to unburden himself by telling the story of events that happened to him some fifteen years earlier. What he is about to set down is the story of The Woman in Black.
His story begins. It is late-November in a bitterly cold and fog-bound London. Kipps is a young solicitor, articled to a Mr Bentley, whom he hopes will be sufficiently impressed with his work to give him the decent pay-rise he needs in order to be able to marry his fiancé. Mr Bentley despatches him on business to the northern coastal town of Crythin Gifford, where a client of long-standing, a Mrs Drablow, has recently died. Her estate includes a large isolated house surrounded by salt marshes and wind-scoured mudflats where the reclusive old lady has left behind a vast quantity of papers – mostly rubbish, Mr Bentley feels convinced, but it will be Arthur’s responsibility to sort through this and bring back to London anything that is relevant to the winding-up of the estate. He is to leave as soon as possible from King’s Cross and sets out in the wet, reeking fog to cross London and catch the train north.
Other than this scene-setting I won’t give away anything further about the plot because it will spoil it. What I want to focus on is what makes this little book so accomplished and how profoundly wrong my initial impressions of it were.
I’ve already said that I thought it was written as a break from Hill’s ‘proper’ literary novels. This was my first mistake, because The Woman in Black is a thoroughly literary piece of work, for in recreating the atmosphere and conventions of the classic nineteenth century ghost story Hill has said she wrote with three guides at her elbow: the ‘two Jameses’ – M.R. James and Henry James, in her view the masters of the ghost story form – and a writer I admit I had never heard of, the academic Julia Briggs, who wrote what Hill regards as ‘the bible’ on the subject of ghost stories, the long out-of-print, Night Visitors: The Rise and Fall of the English Ghost Story.
Anyone who loves classic ghost stories for their quintessential period detail and their literary conventions will not be disappointed by The Woman in Black: the story-within-a-story-within-a-story, often told by a reluctant narrator as the fire falls low in the library or gentleman’s club; long solitary train journeys in the early days of steam and deserted country halts; fog-bound streets and flaring gas lights; isolated houses and eerie salt marshes as darkness falls. Hill’s sense of place and atmosphere are flawless and all of the settings involved in The Woman in Black are wonderfully alive.
However, if this were only a recreation of Victorian story-telling conventions then it would be a lesser book. But it is much more than this, for its real subjects are grief and rage, and it is written with a complete mastery of style and subject and intention. If you love classic ghost stories then don’t do as I did and dismiss The Woman in Black as a slight entertainment, because tragedy lies at its heart and it packs real emotional weight and it is this that makes it such a success. I shall certainly read it again, but right now I’m off to see what Susan Hill’s other ghost stories are like.
Alun Severn
January 2024
Susan Hill titles elsewhere on Letterpress:
Howard’s End is on the landing by Susan Hill
Jacob’s Room Is Full of Books by Susan Hill
Ghost stories elsewhere on Letterpress:
Rereading M.R. James’s ghost stories
Casting the Runes by M.R. James
The Ghosts of Craig Glas Castle by Michelle Briscombe
The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson