Character Analysis

Arthur Kipps: Young and Old

Arthur Kipps is the novel’s protagonist and narrator. Hill presents him in two distinct versions. The young Kipps is a junior solicitor: rational, confident, professionally ambitious, and dismissive of superstition. He approaches his assignment at Eel Marsh House as a routine task and is irritated rather than frightened by the townspeople’s strange behaviour. “I did not believe in ghosts,” he tells the reader. This confidence is not arrogance — it is the natural assurance of a young man who believes the world operates according to reason and logic.

The older Kipps, who narrates the story decades later, is a fundamentally different man. He has been broken by his experience. His first wife, Stella, and their baby son are dead. He cannot speak about what happened and can barely bring himself to write about it. The gap between the two versions of Kipps creates the novel’s pervasive dramatic irony: every moment of the young Kipps’s courage and confidence is undercut by the reader’s knowledge that it will all end in devastation.

Key Fact

Kipps functions as two characters: the confident young solicitor and the traumatised older narrator. Hill uses the gap between them to create dramatic irony and to show that the supernatural does not just frighten — it permanently destroys. Kipps’s transformation is the novel’s central tragedy.

Jennet Humfrye: Victim and Villain

Jennet Humfrye is the Woman in Black. She was an unmarried mother in Victorian England whose son Nathaniel was taken from her and given to her sister, Mrs Drablow. When Nathaniel was killed in the pony and trap accident on the marshes, Jennet’s grief transformed into a supernatural rage that persists beyond death. She is described as “dressed in deepest black” with “a wasted face” — her appearance embodies the extremity of her mourning and the consuming nature of her grief.

Hill presents Jennet with deliberate moral complexity. She is a genuine victim of Victorian injustice: a woman stripped of her child by a patriarchal society that punished her for having a baby outside marriage. Her letters reveal desperation, love, and fury. But her curse is monstrous — she kills innocent children who had nothing to do with her suffering. Hill refuses to let the reader simply condemn or pity Jennet. She is both at once: the wronged mother and the child-killer, the victim who became the monster.

Sam Daily is a local landowner and businessman who befriends Kipps. He is practical, kind, and fundamentally honest — the most sympathetic adult character in the novel apart from Kipps himself. Unlike the other townspeople, Sam does not completely avoid the subject of the Woman in Black. He offers veiled warnings, lends Kipps his dog Spider for company, and eventually reveals the full truth of the curse. But even Sam cannot protect Kipps from what is coming.

Sam’s character serves as a foil to Mr Jerome. Where Jerome is paralysed by fear, Sam is pragmatic and courageous enough to speak. But Hill uses Sam to make a crucial point: knowledge of the danger is not enough to prevent it. Sam knows everything about the Woman in Black, yet he cannot stop the curse. This reinforces the novel’s bleak message that some evils cannot be reasoned with, understood, or defeated.

Mr Jerome: Fear Made Visible

Mr Jerome is Mrs Drablow’s land agent in Crythin Gifford. His most significant moment comes when Kipps mentions the woman he saw at the funeral. Jerome’s reaction is extreme and physical: his face drains of colour, his body trembles, and he is unable to speak. Hill uses Jerome as a device to show the reader how deep the community’s terror runs. Jerome is not a coward — he is a competent professional reduced to speechless horror by the mere mention of what Kipps has seen.

Jerome also demonstrates the way the community’s silence perpetuates the cycle of death. He knows the truth but cannot bring himself to tell Kipps. His fear prevents him from issuing the warning that might save lives. In this way, Jerome represents the wider community of Crythin Gifford: well-meaning people whose fear makes them complicit in the ongoing tragedy.

Spider: Loyalty and Vulnerability

Spider, Sam Daily’s small terrier, is often overlooked in character analysis, but she plays a vital role. She provides Kipps with companionship during his terrifying nights at Eel Marsh House. Her instinctive reactions to the supernatural — cowering, whimpering, refusing to enter certain rooms — validate the haunting as objectively real rather than a product of Kipps’s imagination. Animals were traditionally believed to sense the supernatural, and Hill uses this convention to confirm the ghost’s existence.

Stella is Kipps’s wife. She appears only briefly in the novel, but her death — along with their baby’s — is the culmination of the entire narrative. Stella represents innocence, normality, and the possibility of a happy life after the trauma of Eel Marsh House. By killing her and the baby, Hill destroys every hope the reader might have held for Kipps’s recovery. Stella’s death also creates a devastating parallel with Jennet: Kipps, like Jennet, loses the person he loves most. The cycle of grief repeats.

Hill’s decision to keep Stella almost entirely off the page until the final chapter is a structural choice. The reader barely knows her, which might seem to reduce the emotional impact. But the effect is the opposite: because Stella represents the entire future Kipps will never have — the life, the family, the happiness — her loss is felt as the destruction of a possibility rather than a person. This is arguably more devastating because it is abstract: everything Kipps might have been is taken away in a single moment.