H ill, S usan

Abstract

Susan Hill (1942–) has published twenty or more novels and novellas and numerous collections of short stories since the 1960s. Her oeuvre covers many genres, including radio plays, children's fiction, reviews, autobiography, nonfiction, crime fiction, Gothic novels, and ghost stories. Born in Scarborough and shaped by an isolated, bookish childhood, her fiction is permeated with images of the sea, its tidal reach, and death by drowning. Slimy things dug or dredged up from the past and the dank smells of confined spaces recur frequently, creating a sense of eeriness, the macabre, or psychological disturbance. Hill studied English at King's College, London, and had published two seminal novels, The Enclosure (1961) and Do Me a Favour (1963), before finishing her degree. The burgeoning of her professional career as a writer was much influenced by the music of Benjamin Britten, especially the “Sea Interludes” from his opera Peter Grimes (Scullion 2005: 53–4). Novels and short stories, mostly written in Aldeburgh, Suffolk, proliferated until 1975. I'm the King of the Castle (1970) won the Somerset Maugham Award; The Albatross and Other Stories (1971) won the Rhys Memorial Prize; and The Bird of Night (1972) won the Whitbread Award. Literary echoes of Dickens, Henry James, Crabbe, Coleridge, and many others were, and still are, creatively present in Hill's work (see dickens, charles ; james, henry ). Critics have persistently praised her elegant, spare style, social observation, ability to dramatize a wide range of characters, and atmospheric evocation of place (Muir 1982: 274; Lee 2003: paras. 7–8). Initially, however, nascent Gothic motifs went largely unnoted or were considered an aberration (Hofer 1993: 144–5). The primarily realist fiction of Hill's early phase was distinctive in its use of menacing locations, domestic constraints, and marginalized characters.