Context: The Gothic Tradition
The Gothic Tradition
The Woman in Black was published in 1983, but Susan Hill deliberately set her novel in the Edwardian period and wrote it in the style of the Victorian Gothic tradition. This was not accidental — Hill was consciously reviving a form of storytelling that had fallen out of fashion. She has spoken openly about her admiration for the classic ghost story writers, particularly M.R. James, Charles Dickens, and Henry James. Understanding their influence is essential for your prose question because it helps you explain why Hill makes the structural and stylistic choices she does.
The Gothic genre emerged in the eighteenth century with Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764) and was developed by Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis. By the Victorian period, the ghost story had become a distinct sub-genre — often read aloud at Christmas gatherings. Hill's novel self-consciously places itself in this tradition: Arthur Kipps tells his story on Christmas Eve, just as characters in Dickens and M.R. James do.
Hill deliberately wrote The Woman in Black as a pastiche of the Victorian ghost story tradition. The Christmas Eve framing, the isolated setting, and the scholarly narrator all echo conventions established by M.R. James and Charles Dickens.
M.R. James: The Antiquarian Ghost Story
M.R. James is the single most important influence on The Woman in Black. His stories follow a consistent pattern: an educated, rational man travels to an isolated place connected to the past, disturbs something he should not, and is punished for his curiosity. Compare this to Arthur Kipps — a young London solicitor who travels alone to Eel Marsh House to sort the papers of the deceased Alice Drablow. Like James's protagonists, Kipps is rational, sceptical, and completely unprepared for what he finds.
James's stories — collected in Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1904) — rely on suggestion rather than graphic horror. The terror comes from what is almost seen, what is heard in darkness, what the reader is left to imagine. Hill adopts this technique throughout. When Kipps first sees the woman in black at Mrs Drablow's funeral, the description is restrained: she has "a wasted face" with skin "tautly stretched and strained across her bones." Hill gives just enough physical detail to create unease, then lets our imagination do the rest.
M.R. James outlined his principles in prefaces to his collections: the setting should be recognisably real, the ghost should be malevolent, and the story should build gradually from normality to horror. Hill follows all three rules. Crythin Gifford is a real-seeming English market town; Jennet Humfrye is unambiguously malicious; and the novel's first chapters establish Arthur's comfortable London life before slowly drawing him into danger. James also believed the protagonist should be an ordinary person — and Arthur is explicitly ordinary, describing himself as "a young man, healthy, optimistic" with no experience of the supernatural.
Charles Dickens: Atmosphere and the Christmas Frame
Dickens popularised the Christmas ghost story through works like A Christmas Carol (1843) and The Signalman (1866). Hill explicitly uses this convention: the novel opens on Christmas Eve, with Arthur's stepchildren telling ghost stories around the fire. When they press Arthur to contribute, he cannot — the memory is too painful. This framing device immediately signals that Arthur's story is not mere entertainment but something that has genuinely damaged him.
Dickens also mastered the use of pathetic fallacy — using weather and setting to create mood. Hill borrows this extensively. The opening description of London features "fog" and "raw, damp" weather, echoing Bleak House. As Arthur travels towards Crythin Gifford, the weather deteriorates, and at Eel Marsh House the landscape becomes hostile: "the marshes stretched in every direction... desolate, grey, empty."
Henry James: Psychological Ambiguity
Henry James's The Turn of the Screw (1898) leaves the reader uncertain whether the ghosts are real or the narrator is unreliable. Hill's novel is less ambiguous — the ghost is clearly real — but she borrows James's technique of filtering the supernatural through a single narrator's consciousness. We experience everything through Arthur's perceptions, his growing fear, his attempts to rationalise. This first-person retrospective narration creates both intimacy and claustrophobia: we are trapped inside Arthur's experience, just as he is trapped at Eel Marsh House.
Henry James demonstrated that a ghost story could be literary — exploring innocence, corruption, and moral responsibility alongside its supernatural elements. Hill follows this model. The Woman in Black is not just horror; it examines guilt, grief, the failure of rationality, and the way trauma echoes across generations.
Hill combines M.R. James's antiquarian structure (rational man, isolated setting, malevolent ghost), Dickens's atmospheric techniques (pathetic fallacy, Christmas framing), and Henry James's psychological depth (first-person narration). The result is a novel that feels Victorian but was written for a modern audience.
Why This Matters in the Exam
In the post-1914 prose section of your second literature exam, you answer ONE question worth 40 marks. An extract from the novel is printed on the paper, and the question is based on it. It rewards AO1 (a personal response supported by evidence), AO2 (language, form and structure) and AO4, which is the accuracy of your own writing. Context is not a marked objective here, so never write a bolt-on context paragraph. Background still helps you explain why Hill chose an isolated setting: M.R. James had made isolation a ghost story convention, and Hill evokes that tradition.
The Edwardian setting is itself a contextual choice. By setting her 1983 novel in the early 1900s, Hill distances the reader from the modern world — there are no telephones at Eel Marsh House, no way for Arthur to call for help. This isolation would have been impossible in a contemporary setting but is entirely plausible in the Edwardian period, which is exactly why Hill chose it.