Susan Hill

Standard Name: Hill, Susan
Birth Name: Susan Elizabeth Hill
Married Name: Susan Elizabeth Wells
SH began publishing very young, and has been extraordinarily prolific throughout the second half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. She started off as a novelist and short-story writer, and then branched out into other genres, particularly children's writing, but also radio plays, scholarly and editorial work, cooking and gardening books, and travel writing. In fiction, she has made her own a territory of mutely suffering protagonists too eccentric, powerless, or impaired (emotionally, intellectually or physically) to engineer their escape from emotional pain and despair. (Attempts at escape generally fail.) Many of her characters (including children and old people) are isolated; relationships are often based on tormenting or exaggerated dependence. Her social settings are often unparticularised by date, but are apparently a kind of old-fashioned present; other fictions inhabit the past. She works with both the bleakly realistic and quotidian, and with atmospheres of gothic uncanniness, but her typical narrating voice remains steadfastly detached.
Colour photo of Susan Hill posing with her Commander of the British Empire (CBE) medal at Buckingham Palace, after her investiture ceremony on 13 December 2012. She wears a bright red fascinator hat with feathers and a red rose.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Literary responses Nancy Mitford
This enormously successful was also well reviewed. It was a Book Society Choice, and earned NM over £7,000 in the first six months, funding her move from England to Paris.
Hastings, Selina. Nancy Mitford: A Biography. Hamish Hamilton, 1985.
168
Fraser, Antonia. “A Most Superior Street”. Spectator.co.uk. Champagne for the brain.
After its success on...
Literary responses Iris Murdoch
Among a chorus of discriminating praise, Susan Hill (after identifying herself as a Murdoch enthusiast who ranked her, with William Golding and Lawrence Durrell , as one of the three best and most important living...
Literary responses Eva Figes
In a brief review for The Times, Jacky Gillott entirely ignored the novel's form while contrasting its tone, to its disadvantage, with Susan Hill 's In the Springtime of the Year. She found...
Literary responses Mary Wesley
Early praise for MW 's work came from such different writers as Marghanita Laski and Susan Hill . Other commentators likened her work to that of Rose Macaulay , Elizabeth Bowen , Barbara Pym ...
Literary responses Fay Weldon
Critics praised the novel for its terse prose and controlled tone, and admired its focus on precisely realised characters and situations. L. E. Sissman in the New Yorker commented that FW presents the gross texture...
Occupation John Donne
During the later seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries Donne's writings were largely forgotten or disapproved of. In June 1741 the London Magazine printed a regularised (to modern eyes butchered) version of Goe, and catche a...
Reception Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
Among many enthusiastic reviews, that in the Sunday Times stands out: A writer of genius . . . . a writer of world class—a master story teller.
qtd. in
Jhabvala, Ruth Prawer. Heat and Dust. Penguin, 1994.
back cover
However, Indian critic Vasant Shahane deplored...
Reception Penelope Fitzgerald
Mollie Hardwick in Books and Bookmen pronounced this to be a delicate water-colour of a novel, small and charming.
qtd. in
“Contemporary Authors”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Centre-LRC.
PF 's winning of the coveted, ten-thousand-pound Booker Prize for it suggests that others saw more...
Textual Production Doris Lessing
DL , a writer strongly oriented towards public policy, began giving interviews on public as well as literary topics as soon as she first acquired a reputation. On 14 January 1987 she talked to Susan Hill
Textual Production Elaine Feinstein
She entitled her next poetry collection, in April 1971, The Magic Apple Tree (a title also used by Susan Hill in 1982). At the Edge, December 1972, was a limited edition in 150 numbered...

Timeline

No timeline events available.

Texts

Hill, Susan. The Bird of Night. Hamish Hamilton, 1972.
Hill, Susan. The Boy Who Taught the Beekeeper to Read. Chatto and Windus, 2003.
Hill, Susan. The Cold Country, and Other Plays for Radio. British Broadcasting Corporation, 1975.
Hill, Susan. The Enclosure. Hutchinson, 1961.
Hill, Susan, and Valerie Littlewood. The Glass Angels. Walker, 1991.
Hill, Susan, and John Lawrence. The Magic Apple Tree. Hamish Hamilton, 1982.
Hill, Susan. The Man in the Picture. Profile, 2007.
Hill, Susan. The Mist in the Mirror. Sinclair-Stevenson, 1992.
Hill, Susan. The Service of Clouds. Chatto and Windus, 1998.
Hill, Susan. The Various Haunts of Men. Chatto and Windus, 2004.
Hill, Susan, and John Lawrence. The Woman in Black. Hamish Hamilton, 1983.
Mallatrat, Stephen et al. The Woman in Black: A Ghost Play.
Mallatrat, Stephen, and Susan Hill. The Woman in Black: A Ghost Play. French, 1989.