Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
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.
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Sixty-four of ML
's short stories were published in magazines before most of them were collected in volumes. She was a frequent contributor to Atlantic Monthly, the Dublin Magazine, Harper's Bazaar, and...
Anthologization
Mary Lavin
The London edition followed from Michael Joseph
the next year, with a Reader's Union
edition two years after that. There are several modern editions. A Town House
paperback of 1996 has a new introduction by...
Dedications
Rose Tremain
It is dedicated to Brenda
and David Reid
; those whom RT
thanks include Susan Hill
for introducing me to her helpful and courteous police contacts.
Tremain, Rose. The Road Home. Vintage, 2007.
367
Friends, Associates
Joanna Trollope
She still has the same core group of close friends she's had for the past thirty years, and many friends in the world of writing. The latter includeSusan Hill
and Jilly Cooper
.
Joanna Trollope. The official website of Joanna Trollope OBE.
Biography
Intertextuality and Influence
Charlotte Brontë
Jane Eyre has been filmed repeatedly for both television and the cinema, as well as being made the subject of musicals, plays, and a ballet performed by the London Children's Ballet
in 1997 and 2008...
Intertextuality and Influence
Daphne Du Maurier
Rebecca was DDM
's best known work, earning her massive profits, and it has become one of the most widely read novels of all time.
Kelly, Richard. Daphne du Maurier. Twayne, 1987.
66
The Times Literary Supplement reviewer wrote: In its kind...
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
Nadine Gordimer
Susan Hill
in The Times praised (and quoted from) the introduction. She found the later stories technically more adept than the earlier ones, as well as richer and more complex, but refused therefore to declare...
Literary responses
Pamela Hansford Johnson
Some reviewers accused PHJ
, with some reason, of repetition and of stretching out material already thin.
But Susan Hill
in The Times celebrated her for her wisdom, perceptiveness, imagination, and freedom from showy...
Literary responses
Flora Macdonald Mayor
Critics have often bracketed The Third Miss Symons and The Rector's Daughter together as FMM
's masterpieces, in their terse prose style and resistance to stereotypes of spinsterhood. Victoria Glendinning
, reviewing Oldfield's life of...
Literary responses
Nina Bawden
A sequel, Rebel on a Rock, 1978, was welcomed by Susan Hill
(who thought it excellent although not one of NB
's best) with praise of her unfailing inventiveness, sympathy, subtlety, and sheer good...
Literary responses
Flora Macdonald Mayor
One of the stories, The Kind Action of Mr. Robinson, has been judged one of the finest in the language.
Keith, Rhonda. British Novelists 1890-1929: Modernists. Staley, Thomas F.Editor , Gale Research Company, 1985, pp. 169 -71.
171
But in spite of a preface by M. R. James
, Susan Hill
Literary responses
Patricia Beer
PB
thought that she lacked the particular skills needed for dialogue and for imagining herself into the mind of a character; but this novel suggests that she under-estimated herself.
Sherry, Vincent B., editor. Dictionary of Literary Biography 40. Gale Research, 1985.
26
Reviewer Susan Hill
appreciated the...
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...
Timeline
1952
Angus Wilson
published Hemlock and After, which Margaret Drabble
in 2008 called one of the first gay novels to hit the postwar world.
“Back—due to popular demand”. The Guardian, pp. Review 4 - 6.
4
By April 1978
Marilyn French
's important feministnovelThe Women's Room (a bestseller in the USA in 1977) appeared in an English edition.