Readers will recognise some of the conventional properties of this highly conventional form: the art of the author is to turn our expectations into apprehension. Of course the locals are fearful of the place and yet highly reluctant to talk of their fears. Of course she had lived in a gloomy mansion – Eel Marsh House – cut off from the village by a causeway that is only passable at low tide. Or you could think that it shows him still possessed by the fears that the story has re-awakened.Īs a young man, Arthur, then a junior solicitor in a London law firm, was sent to the remote town of Crythin Gifford to sort out the papers of a recently dead client of the firm, Mrs Alice Drablow. Enough.' You could take this as evidence that a kind of exorcism has been achieved: Arthur himself uses this metaphor for the act of narration. Thus the book's terse concluding sentences: 'They asked for my story. At its end, the storyteller has managed a difficult task. In the opening of this narrative the storyteller talks of coming out 'from under the long shadow cast by the events of the past'. 'I have sat here at my desk, day after day, night after night, a blank sheet of paper before me, unable to lift my pen, trembling and weeping too.'Ī ghost comes back from the past, and so does a ghost story. The story has to be told, but must be difficult to tell. 'I was trying to suppress my mounting unease, to hold back the rising flood of memory.' The Woman in Black shares with many ghost stories a principle of narrative reluctance.

(Most ghost stories are novellas or short stories, so that they might be fitted into a single, uninterrupted reading.)Īrthur is too darkly haunted by the story that he has in his head to join in the family game. The master of the ghost story, the Cambridge don MR James, used to read his latest compositions out loud to friends before publishing them. Some of the best ghost stories – The Turn of the Screw is the most famous example – begin with this situation: a person telling a story to a group of rapt listeners. For the classic ghost story is a performance. Naturally they begin to tell ghost stories: Christmas is the time for this, when the year is darkest and family or friends are gathered together to be entertained.

When the novella opens, he is a man in late middle age, surrounded by adult stepchildren at Christmas. Arthur Kipps is giving us a tale that he is condemned by his own memories to tell. But when it comes to hauntings this traditional description is fitting. Literary critics rarely use this last term, preferring to talk of the 'narrator'. T his is a ghost story, so we start with the storyteller.

The woman in black by susan hill