![]() ![]() Arthur’s family asks him to share a ghost story, and the full force of Arthur’s dormant trauma suddenly rears its head. It is Christmas Eve, a time of joy and good tidings as Arthur celebrates with his wife and stepchildren, though, it becomes clear that he is a man haunted by a painful past. ![]() At the start of the novel, Arthur is a well-to-do lawyer who lives in a stately country home with his large, happy family. ![]() Such atmospheric dread is a staple of literary horror-and especially of Victorian Gothic literature-and Hill uses it to create an intensifying sense of terror as the story unfolds. Through her reliance upon Gothic horror tropes throughout protagonist Arthur Kipps’s story, Hill is able to fulfill and subvert her readers’ expectations at alternating turns, and ultimately uses the narrative to suggest that though an audience familiar with the genre may be able to intuit what is coming next, true horror often comes from having one’s worst fears confirmed.Įven in moments of happiness throughout the novel, Susan Hill creates an atmosphere of intense foreboding. Though written in the mid-1980s rather than the late eighteenth century, The Woman in Black is in many ways a classic Gothic novel-and a love letter to the genre, which spawned emotionally and atmospherically evocative classics such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. ![]() Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black is saturated with references to popular Gothic horror novels. ![]()
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