Cold Enclosures: the fiction of Susan Hill

Abstract

Susan Hill’s fictional output has been substantial and has been well received by the English literary establishment. Between 1961 and 1976, she published nine novels, two short story anthologies, one collection of radio plays, and received recognition with the Somerset Maugham Award in 1971, the Whitbread Literary Award in 1972, and the Rhys Memorial Prize in 1972. Her success enabled her to be financially independent as a writer from 1963 onwards. Unlike many of her contemporaries, Susan Hill does not seem to be primarily concerned with the subject, or the subjection, of women. A female consciousness rarely forms the centre of her tales, and questions of women’s social position appear merely as vague shadows hovering on the edges of her writing. Yet, in spite of this subordination of women, a close reading of Hill’s work seems to vindicate a feminist approach. For her victims, her peculiar cast of artists, idiots, children, lonely and dying men and women, are all romantic figures who have given up the struggle to live in an adult, ‘masculine’ world. They are enclosed within their fears of engagement with a difficult, demanding actuality. They withdraw into passive, dependent situations, feeling that they do not know how to ‘live’.

And then we came to that old country

Where the ice and snow do lie,

Where there’s ice and snow,

And the great whales blow,

And the long night does not die.

The Cold Country, p. 79