Librarian's Note: There is more than one author by this name. Hill has recently founded her own publishing company, Long Barn Books, which has published one work of fiction per year. Their first daughter, Jessica, was born in 1977 and their second daughter, Clemency, was born in 1985. In 1975 she married Shakespeare scholar Stanley Wells and they moved to Stratford upon Avon. This was followed in quick succession by A Change for the Better, I'm the King of the Castle, The Albatross and other stories, Strange Meeting, The Bird of Night, A Bit of Singing and Dancing and In the Springtime of Year, all written and published between 19. Her next novel Gentleman and Ladies was published in 1968. The novel was criticised by The Daily Mail for its sexual content, with the suggestion that writing in this style was unsuitable for a 'schoolgirl'. By this time she had already written her first novel, The Enclosure which was published by Hutchinson in her first year at university.

At Barrs Hill she took A levels in English, French, History and Latin, proceeding to an English degree at King's College London. Her fellow pupils included Jennifer Page, the first Chief Executive of the Millennium Dome.

Hill states that she attended a girls’ grammar school, Barr's Hill. Her family left Scarborough in 1958 and moved to Coventry where her father worked in car and aircraft factories. She attended Scarborough Convent School, where she became interested in theatre and literature. Her hometown was later referred to in her novel A Change for the Better (1969) and some short stories especially 'Cockles and Mussels'. Susan Hill was born in Scarborough, North Yorkshire in 1942. The Woman In Black is both a brilliant exercise in atmosphere and controlled horror and a delicious spine-tingler-proof positive that this neglected genre, the ghost story, isn't dead after all. The routine formalities he anticipates give way to a tumble of events and secrets more sinister and terrifying than any nightmare: the rocking chair in the deserted nursery, the eerie sound of a pony and trap, a child's scream in the fog, and most dreadfully-and for Kipps most tragically- The Woman In Black. Set on the obligatory English moor, on an isolated causeway, the story has as its hero Arthur Kipps, an up-and-coming young solicitor who has come north from London to attend the funeral and settle the affairs of Mrs. What real reader does not yearn, somewhere in the recesses of his or her heart, for a really literate, first-class thriller-one that chills the body, but warms the soul with plot, perception, and language at once astute and vivid? In other words, a ghost story written by Jane Austen?Īlas, we cannot give you Austen, but Susan Hill's remarkable Woman In Black comes as close as our era can provide.

The woman in black book susan hill