Susan Hill’s Lost Hearts: The Woman in Black and the Serrailler Novels

Abstract

Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black (1983) is one of the most celebrated ghost stories of modern times. Adapted for television in 1989, it continues to attract interest and is now the subject of a recent major film. One of the main reasons for the story’s impact is its overwhelmingly tragic, yet compelling, central theme, the death of children and the appalling consequences which flow from it. It is a subject that is at once profoundly and universally affecting, not just because of the tragedy of a life unfulfilled, but because the death of children is the death of the future. It stops the tide of life in its tracks and conjures up the nightmare world of P. D. James’s novel, The Children of Men, where no children are born to an infertile population. From a literary perspective, the story has one of the iconic spectres of contemporary fiction, the figure of the woman in black herself, doomed to pass on her own grief to all who witness her melancholy presence.

That is the land of lost content... (A. E. Housman (1859–936), A Shropshire Lad, XL)¹