The young men of the house have switched off every lamp except the ones on the Christmas tree. One by one they try to outdo each other with the most lurid ghost story they can invent: monks, headless riders, clanking chains, vampires, rats, women turned white-haired overnight. The tales get sillier until everyone is choking with laughter. Their stepfather, sitting a little back from the fire with his pipe, is asked for his turn, and he stands up, says he has no story to tell, and walks straight out of the house into the frozen orchard. The Woman in Black by Susan Hill opens with a man who knows exactly how unlike the real thing those fireside stories are, and the rest of the novel is his attempt to prove it.
Why The Woman in Black Is Written, Not Told
That opening decision shapes everything. Arthur Kipps, now a contented country gentleman of middle age, resolves to exorcise his memory by setting it down on paper, privately, for no audience but himself and, after his death, his wife. The whole book is that manuscript. It gives Hill a voice that is formal, careful and slightly stiff, a man choosing his words because he is afraid of them, and it gives the reader a strange double vision. The older Kipps is gentle and haunted. The younger one he describes, a solicitor of twenty-three sent to settle a dead client’s estate, is cocky, comfortable and blind.
The contrast is the novel’s quiet engine. The young man leaves a London buried in yellow fog, delighted to be travelling, with a schoolboy’s love of steam engines. He eats a large dinner at the inn and sleeps well, and the narrator notes, with a weight the boy could not feel, “that innocence, once lost, is lost forever”. The device makes The Woman in Black by Susan Hill a story about memory as much as fear: what a single week can do to the rest of a life.
The Marsh Does the Haunting
The second great achievement is the landscape. The house Kipps must clear sits out on the estuary at the end of a long track that floods with every tide, and Hill writes the first crossing, in bright November sun, as something close to rapture. Kipps is dazzled by the size of the sky, the shining water, the bleached reeds and the harsh cries of birds. He fancies living there. That he falls in love with the place before anything goes wrong is the cruellest decision in the book, because the beauty never quite leaves even when the fear arrives.
Two figures anchor it. Keckwick, the silent man who drives the pony trap out to the house and back, says almost nothing and turns up at two in the morning when he is needed. Samuel Daily, the blunt landowner Kipps meets on the train, is the book’s one warm adult, a self-made man whose crude kindness takes the form of lending a terrier. Her name is Spider, she has comically bushy eyebrows, and she becomes the reader’s barometer. When she growls at a door, the hair rises. A late chapter in which she bolts across the marsh after a whistle no living person made is among the most frightening sequences in The Woman in Black by Susan Hill, and it hinges entirely on how much the reader has come to love a small dog.
Hill is just as good on daylight, which is where much of the dread is stored. Between visits to the house there is a noisy market-day lunch with four dozen farmers at trestle tables, roast beef, a whole Cheshire cheese passed down the bench, and a neighbour who goes quiet the moment the dead woman’s land is mentioned. There is a borrowed sit-up-and-beg bicycle on which Kipps rides thirty miles through the last of the autumn to prove to himself that he is fine. These interludes are warm and ordinary, and they make each return across the water feel like a choice he should not be making. The restraint of The Woman in Black by Susan Hill lies in how long it lets him enjoy himself.
Where Crythin Gifford Keeps Its Mouth Shut
Not everything holds. Kipps ignores so many warnings for so long that sympathy wears thin: the landlord’s flinch, the farmers’ silence, the open dread of everyone he asks. Some of that is the point, a portrait of metropolitan arrogance, but a reader who has picked up a horror novel is six chapters ahead of its hero and must wait for him to catch up. The townspeople’s refusal to say anything at all also starts to look like a convenience. Every adult in the market town knows the truth and keeps it back with perfect discipline until the plot requires a confession, which is tidy for the structure and hard to believe as behaviour.
The period is oddly unfixed, too. There are motor cars, telephones and weak electric bulbs alongside pony traps, oil lamps and a county name left blank with a dash. Some will find that timelessness eerie and deliberate; others will feel the novel is wearing Victorian costume over a vaguer age. And the central ghostly event, a disaster on the marsh that Kipps hears in fog rather than sees, is so effective the first time that its return loses some force. The fear of The Woman in Black by Susan Hill works best when it is new. The book also asks a reader to sit with grief, menace towards the very young and towards an animal, and a long illness of the nerves, all handled with restraint and none of it graphic.
Where The Woman in Black Came From
Susan Hill, born on the Yorkshire coast in 1942, had spent two decades as a literary novelist when she turned to this form, and she has spoken of her affection for the traditional English ghost story of suspense and atmosphere, the line that runs through M. R. James and Daphne du Maurier. She even names one chapter after one of James’s best-known tales, the one about a summoning whistle. Made a Dame in 2020 for services to literature, she went back to the same territory with The Mist in the Mirror in 1992 and, a year later, wrote Mrs de Winter, her sequel to du Maurier’s Rebecca.
The novel’s afterlife has been long. In 1989 the television writer Nigel Kneale adapted it for ITV, renaming the hero Arthur Kidd, and that film became a cult item partly because it was so hard to see for years afterwards. BBC radio has dramatised it more than once, including a four-part version in 1993 with Robert Glenister as the young lawyer and John Woodvine as his older self, and a single play in 2004 starring James D’Arcy. Another author, Martyn Waites, later wrote a sequel, Angel of Death, which reached cinemas in 2015.
None of that machinery is needed to enjoy The Woman in Black by Susan Hill, which remains short enough to read in an evening and spare enough to be remembered for years.
Where It Leaves You
The faults are visible: a slow-witted hero, a town that keeps silent on cue, a key sound effect played twice. Against them stand a crossing of the marsh written with real wonder, a terrier who earns a reader’s devotion, and an old man’s decision to write rather than speak, which turns a fright into a confession. The Woman in Black by Susan Hill frightens, but what lingers is the cost of what Kipps saw.
Readers who want more of that patient English dread should try House of Splinters by Laura Purcell, another house that will not let its occupant go, or turn to Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia for a remote mansion with a family secret rotting at its core. The collected ghost stories of M. R. James sit naturally beside it on any October shelf.
Some families tell ghost stories at Christmas. This one stays in the drawer until the man who wrote it is gone.