The Woman In Black by Susan Hill

Now this is a ghost story!

After my disappointment at taking the plunge to scare myself witless with The Turning of the Screw and not getting so much as a shiver, I went for this one when I saw it for £1 in Reid of Liverpool. I saw it as a film one Christmas Eve some years ago on TV and it is one of the scariest things I have seen, (you can read about it on IMDb, read the users comments too). So I knew the story beforehand. It has also been adapted for stage as a play that has been on at the Fortune Theatre in London for over 20 years.

It starts on another Christmas Eve with another family telling ghost stories, leading Arthur Kipps to write down something unspeakable that happened to him earlier in his life.

As a young solicitor, level headed, engaged and with his whole life ahead of him, Kipps is sent to wind up an elderly lady's estate on the edge of a remote Northern England town. Misty and surrounded in marshes, the towns people are shifty and secretive, especially when Kipps explains his business there. At the womans funeral, attended only by himself and Mr Jerome, a local agent, Kipps sees a woman dressed all in black Victorian clothing, first at the back of the church and then in the graveyard some way from them. She appears to have a body wasting disease, her skin hangs on her bones. When Kipps asks Mr Jerome about her, the poor man becomes a dithering wreck, almost panicking to get away.

Kipps is obliged to go to the dead womans house to sort through her papers. She lived in a lonely house on the marshes, reachable only by a causeway at low tide. Only one person from the town will take him there. It is at Eel Marsh House that the main body of the story takes place. Kipps is determined that local superstition will not deter him and he decides to stay at the house to avoid the difficulties that arise getting to it. Poor naive soul!

With all the elements of a good haunting, suffused with good doses of malevolence and menace, this part of the book rockets along without pausing for breath, towards its conclusion.

This is a ghost story in its traditional sense, lots of gothic imagery, scene setting, and gentle tension building. When the roller coaster has finished its climb, the main part of the story whooshes along relentlessly with barely a breath.

I have always said that ghost stories scare me, a lot, and this one did raise my blood pressure more than once. Had I not known the story I may have found the tension and unpredictability more than I could cope with. Thank goodness for Spider, the little dog who stays with Kipps at the house. There is a decent story behind the happenings, leaked to us in pieces like a good mystery. The book uses lots of anticipation to keep us on the edge of our seat. All in all I found it an enjoyably exciting story, well paced and interesting with a number of scenes that made me nervous more than actually frightened (unlike the film where I thought my heart was coming through my ribs and I watched most of it peeping behind a cushion!).

Susan Hill has her own website where you can read about this book and her other work.

Readers Place also have a reading guide that includes starting points for discussion.

I read this for #11 of the 2009 mini challenges, to read something that was out of your comfort zone.

The Turn of the Screw by Henry James

While chatting to a friend recently about another book (The Suspicions of Mr Whicher by Kate Summerscale) which is on my TBR pile, she said that it mentions 2 other classics, The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins, which I have read, and The Turn of the Screw by Henry James which was on my TBR pile thanks to our recent Book Swap in work. Being only 94 pages long I decided to pick it up.
Written in 1898 it is about a governess taking up a position at a large country house, taking care of 2 children who are under the charge of their uncle who lives in London. Their parents are dead. One of the clauses of the contract is that the governess does not contact the uncle and is to take sole charge. She is clearly attracted to her employer and excited at the rise in her position so she agrees even if a little overwhelmed with the responsibility. She is to share the house with Mrs Grose the housekeeper, the children, Flora who is the youngest, and Miles, who is to come home from school later in the week, and a few other servants.
Very soon after arrival the governess learns that Miles has been expelled from school, and no reason is given immediately, but on meeting him she finds he is a model pupil and perfectly behaved, like his sister and she quickly becomes attached to them. However, very soon after taking the position she finds strange things happening in the house and in the grounds, and she believes that the children are in grave danger from a supernatural influence.
The beginning has more than a flavour of Jane Eyre arriving at Thornfield Hall half a century before and references it clearly. It also mentions Anne Radcliffes Mysteries of Udolpho, setting the scene for another gothic mystery, and the house and grounds are a very atmospheric base for such a story. I have read Portrait of a Lady by Henry James and so have encountered his writing style before, and it can seem very long winded and evasive as to what the characters are thinking or even communicating to each other. This story I found particularly so. There are long sections of dialogue where nothing is actually said but only vaguely insinuated. This suits the main character very well, as it is her that is telling the story in the first person, and she jumps about 10 paces ahead of everything that happens to her, fixing her own meaning to everything, sometimes wildly, as she becomes more obsessed with the children, citing that they are hers alone.
Although not strictly a sensationalist novel, there are definitely elements of such that James has used here it seems to me. It is also deliberately ambiguous and so anyone who likes their stories straightforward will find this one frustrating. The introduction by Dr Claire Seymour from the University of Tokyo concludes that "The dilemma for the reader is how to preserve James' ambiguity while also locating its 'meaning' ". I agreed with this statement.

I have to say that I quite like ambiguous writing, for example Toni Morrison’s Beloved, which does not explain the whole meaning but leaves it for your own conclusions. However in this case it drove me nuts. I think it was because I did not find our story teller too credible. Apparently there are 2 camps of readers for this story, those who believe it to be a supernatural mystery, and those who believe it is a story about an emotionally fragile woman who starts hallucinating. I fall into the 2nd camp. I thought she was deranged.
Ghost stories scare the pants off me, very easily, and I tend to avoid them. This story did not scare me at all, and disappointed on that level. Maybe that was James’ intention, to make a joke of those who like to be spooked. Especially as the whole tale is related as a Christmas Eve ghost story by someone called Douglas at the beginning. Is James playing with our expectations and love of a good mystery? I don’t know, but it wasn’t my cup of tea. Maybe my own expectations were too high. I found the discussion about its meaning more interesting than the actual reading of it, and so it is probably a good choice for readers groups.

You can download a free eBook version of the story here.
There is also an interesting article called Ghost story, or study in libidinal repression by Sumia S. Abdul Hafidh