Susan Hill

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Biography

Novelist, children's writer and playwright Susan (Elizabeth) Hill was born in Scarborough, England, on 5 February 1942. She was educated at Scarborough Convent School and at grammar school in Coventry, before reading English at King's College, London, graduating in 1963 and becoming a Fellow in 1978. Her first novel, The Enclosure, was published in 1961 when she was still a student. She worked as a freelance journalist between 1963 and 1968, publishing her third novel, Gentleman and Ladies, in 1968. She became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1972 and was a presenter of BBC Radio 4's 'Bookshelf' from 1986 to 1987. In 1996 she started her own publishing company, Long Barn Books, editing and publishing a quarterly literary journal, Books and Company, in 1998.

She won a Somerset Maugham Award for I'm the King of the Castle (1970); the Whitbread Novel Award for The Bird of Night (1972); and the Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for The Albatross (1971), a collection of short stories. Her latest collection of short stories is The Boy Who Taught the Beekeeper to Read (2003).

Other novels include Strange Meeting (1971), set during the First World War, In the Springtime of the Year (1974), Air and Angels (1991), and most recently, The Service of Clouds (1998). The Woman in Black (1983), a Victorian ghost story, was successfully adapted for stage and television and Mrs de Winter (1993) is a sequel to Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca.

Susan Hill is also the author of two volumes of memoir, The Magic Apple Tree: A Country Year (1982), about her life in rural Oxfordshire during the 1970s, and Family (1989), in which she writes about her early life in Scarborough.

Her books for children include The Glass Angels (1991); Beware, Beware (1993); King of Kings (1993) and The Battle for Gullywith (2008). She has also written radio plays, a number of books of non-fiction and has edited several anthologies of short stories including two volumes of The Penguin Book of Modern Women's Short Stories, published in 1991 and 1997.

Her recent books, The Various Haunts of Men (2004), Pure in Heart (2005), and The Risk of Darkness (2006), form a series of books about the adventures of Detective Chief Inspector Simon Serailler. A fourth book in the series, The Vows of Silence, was published in 2008. The Man in the Picture (2007) is a classic ghost story in the tradition of The Woman in Black.

Susan Hill is married to the Shakespeare scholar Professor Stanley Wells with whom she lives in a farmhouse in the north Cotswolds. Her latest book is The Beacon (2008), a literary novella.

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Genres (in alphabetical order)

Autobiography, Children, Drama, Fiction, Non-fiction, Radio drama, Short stories

Bibliography

The Enclosure   Hutchinson, 1961

Do Me a Favour   Hutchinson, 1963

Gentleman and Ladies   Hamish Hamilton, 1968

A Change for the Better   Hamish Hamilton, 1969

I'm the King of the Castle   Hamish Hamilton, 1970

Strange Meeting   Hamish Hamilton, 1971

The Albatross   Hamish Hamilton, 1971

The Bird of Night   Hamish Hamilton, 1972

The Custodian   (limited edition of 600 copies)   Covent Garden Press, 1972

A Bit of Singing and Dancing   Hamish Hamilton, 1973

In the Springtime of the Year   Hamish Hamilton, 1974

The Cold Country and Other Plays for Radio   BBC Publications, 1975

The Distracted Preacher and Other Stories by Thomas Hardy   (editor)   Penguin, 1979

New Stories   (editor with Isabel Quigly)   Hutchinson (for the Arts Council of Great Britain and PEN), 1980

The Magic Apple Tree: A Country Year   Hamish Hamilton, 1982

Ghost Stories   (editor)   Hamish Hamilton, 1983

People: Essays and Poems   (editor)   Chatto & Windus, 1983

The Woman in Black   Hamish Hamilton, 1983

One Night at a Time   Hamish Hamilton, 1984

The Ramshackle Company   Longman, 1985

Mother's Magic   Hamish Hamilton, 1986

The Lighting of the Lamps   Hamish Hamilton, 1986

Lanterns Across the Snow   Michael Joseph, 1987

Shakespeare Country   Michael Joseph, 1987

Can It Be True?: A Christmas Story   Hamish Hamilton, 1988

The Spirit of the Cotswolds   Michael Joseph, 1988

Family   Michael Joseph, 1989

Suzy's Shoes   Hamish Hamilton, 1989

Ghost Stories   (editor)   Longman, 1990

I Won't Go There Again   Julia MacRae, 1990

Septimus Honeydew   Julia MacRae, 1990

Stories from Codling Village   Julia MacRae, 1990

The Parchment Man: An Anthology of Modern Women's Short Stories   (editor)   Michael Joseph, 1990

The Walker Book of Ghost Stories   (editor)   Walker, 1990

Air and Angels   Sinclair-Stevenson, 1991

The Glass Angels   Walker, 1991

The Penguin Book of Modern Women's Short Stories   (editor)   Penguin, 1991

A Very Special Birthday   Walker, 1992

The Mist in the Mirror: A Ghost Story   Sinclair-Stevenson, 1992

Beware, Beware   Walker, 1993

King of Kings   Walker, 1993

Mrs de Winter   Sinclair-Stevenson, 1993

Pirate Poll   Puffin, 1994

The Christmas Collection   Walker, 1994

Contemporary Women's Short Stories   (editor)   Michael Joseph, 1995

Reflections from a Garden   (with Rory Stuart)   Pavilion, 1995

Listening to the Orchestra   Long Barn Books, 1997

The Second Penguin Book of Modern Women's Short Stories   (editor)   Michael Joseph, 1997

The Service of Clouds   Chatto & Windus, 1998

The Boy Who Taught the Beekeeper to Read   Chatto & Windus, 2003

The Various Haunts of Men   Chatto & Windus, 2004

The Pure in Heart   Chatto & Windus, 2005

The Risk of Darkness   Chatto & Windus, 2006

The Man in the Picture   Profile Books, 2007

The Battle for Gullywith   Bloomsbury, 2008

The Beacon   Chatto & Windus, 2008

The Vows of Silence   Chatto & Windus, 2008

Read about books by Susan Hill at encompassculture.com - the British Council's book database and global online book club

Buy books by Susan Hill at Amazon.co.uk

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Prizes and awards

1971   Somerset Maugham Award   I'm the King of the Castle

1972   Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize   The Albatross

1972   Whitbread Novel Award   The Bird of Night

1988   Nestlé Smarties Book Prize (Gold Award)   (6-8 years category)   Can It Be True?: A Christmas Story

2006   Theakston's Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year   (shortlist)   The Various Haunts of Men

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Critical Perspective

Susan Elizabeth Hill is a prolific writer: the author of numerous novels, collections of short stories, non-fiction and children's fiction as well as a respected reviewer, critic, broadcaster and editor. Above all though it has been Hill's novels - of which there are now more than a dozen - that have captured the public's imagination. Hill has a talent for storytelling, for producing what one Guardian reviewer has called 'a rattling good yarn'. A skilled editor of the work of others (see, for example, her two volume The Penguin Book of Modern Women's Short Stories (1991)), it is clear that Hill applies those editorial skills just as rigorously to her own prose. As a result, her writing reveals an enviable capacity for generating and maintaining suspense through the deployment of fast moving, agile plots. That one of her best loved novels, The Woman in Black (1983), is still running as an adaptation in London's West End, (some 25 years after it was first published!), is an indication of the seductive power of her prose.

Viewed as a whole, certain patterns, images and devices can be seen recurring through Hill's varied fiction of the past forty years. Indeed, it is the repetition and recognition of familiar metaphors and tropes that constitutes one of the pleasures of her work. Typically Hill's writings revolve around wealthy, well-to-do families of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Even her novels set in modern times have a 'days gone by' feel about them, such as The Various Haunts of Men (2004), which was shortlisted for the 2006 Theakston's Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year. Somewhat like an Inspector Morse narrative, The Various Haunts of Men is set in a small cathedral town, closeted from the modernity of the city. Compared, in a positive fashion, with the serial detective fiction of P. D. James, this was the first of a new and popular crime series by Hill, that to date includes The Pure in Heart (2005), The Risk of Darkness (2006) and The Vows of Silence (2008).

Many of Hll's fictional families are dysfunctional, broken, or about to be broken and the protagonists appear isolated, or awkward in the company of others. Many of them occupy haunted properties, such as The Man in the Picture (2007) and her recent novel for younger readers, The Battle for Gullywith (2008). They centre on characters like Thomas Cavendish, the Cambridge University tutor of Air and Angels (1991), Sir James Mammoth (The Mist in the Mirror: A Ghost Story (1992)) and Arthur Kipps (The Woman in Black). These lofty figures explain something of the seductiveness of Hill's prose, which flirts at times with a romantic image of an aristocratic England, a sentimental vision of the country before (or during) the war and imperial decline. However, this is only half the story. Hill's novels are rarely, if ever, conventionally 'romantic', filled as they are with darker, more disturbing images of death, loss and haunting.

Hill's early novel, I'm the King of the Castle (1970) is typical here in terms of its combination of an older, seemingly innocent Victorian England with an account of childhood greed, malevolence and evil. Winner of the Somerset Maugham Award the novel tells the story of an isolated Victorian property ('The Warings'), home to Mr. Hooper and his son Edmund. Things start to go badly wrong when a mother and her son (Kingshaw) move in. To Edmund, Kingshaw (Hill has a thing about loaded names!) is an intruder rather than a companion and must be punished for his presence. I'm the King of the Castle is a disturbing novel about the fears and fantasies of childhood, a gothic tale brimming with locked rooms, attic, moonlight and moths.

It has been pointed out on more than one occasion that the darker side of Hill's work is informed by the tragic circumstances surrounding her own life, including the death of her first partner, second child and her own near-death experience (Hill is anaphylactic). Certainly childhood is a prevailing theme that haunts Hill's fiction, from I'm the King of the Castle to her most recent collection of short stories, The Boy who Taught the Beekeper to Read (2003), where a string of young boys and girls develop often unsettling relationships with older people.

In the Springtime of the Year (1974) is a semi-autobiographical novel about loss. This subtle work of fiction describes the sense of loneliness and isolation felt by Ruth following the sudden death of her husband. Shortly after the publication of this melancholy, moving text, Hill announced her retirement from writing. However, a decade later she made a memorable return to fiction in the form of The Woman in Black. The Woman in Black is essentially a ghost story. Like a number of her books, it borrows imaginatively from the styles and conventions of the nineteenth century realist novel. Many of the images and themes of the book are drawn from this tradition and will be familiar to the 'knowing' reader: the city as a site of disease, for instance. The text self-consciously signals its literary heritage through its title (a playful reversal of Wilkie Collins's Victorian ghost story, The Woman in White) and through its references and allusions to Dickens's Great Expectations: 'I had expected it [the late Mrs. Drablow's house] to be a shrine to the memory of her husband of so short a time, like the house of poor Miss Havisham'. The Woman in Black is by no means simply a faithful reproduction of the 'past masters' however. The compressed prose and the nuanced characterisation, along with the clever use of silence and the unsaid suggest that this is also very much a modern novel about modern times.

In the 1990s Susan Hill wrote a number of novels which built upon the characteristic themes of her earlier work. In 1993, Mrs De Winter was published as a sequel to Daphne Du Maurier's classic, Rebecca, further demonstrating her ability to work within and beyond traditional literary styles and conventions. Similarly her recent novella, The Beacon (2008) with its remote rural setting and family revenge narrative, deftly evokes Brontë's Wuthering Heights. Other novels, such as Air and Angels (1991) and The Mist in the Mirror (1993) describe the unsettling, life changing encounters of respectable gentlemen. Meanwhile, her most recent novel, The Service of Clouds (1998) contains a dual narrative, that shifts between the world of a mother and her son. Through the echoes and parallels that emerge between their lives we are given one of Hill's most perceptive and sensitive explorations into the psychology of family relationships.

Dr James Procter, 2009

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Contact information

Publisher (General enquiries) Chatto & Windus c/o Random House Group Ltd 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road London  SW1V 2SA England Tel: +44 (0)20 7840 8540 Fax: +44 (0)20 7932 0077 E-mail: chattopublicity@randomhouse.co.uk http://www.randomhouse.co.uk

Agent Sheil Land Associates Ltd 52 Doughty Street London  WC1N 2LS England Tel: +44 (0)20 7405 9351 Fax: +44 (0)20 7831 2127 E-mail: info@sheilland.co.uk

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Related links

http:/ / www.susan-hill.com

http:/ / www.thewomaninblack.com

http:/ / www.booksandcompany.co.uk

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