Another bleak house on the Fens

Some years ago, Susan Hill stated in an interview: ‘It’s not plot that interests me but setting, people in a setting, wrestling with an abstract subject.’ In her ghost stories, of which Dolly is the latest, Hill exploits the impact of setting on character: the
role of atmosphere and environment in shaping human suggestibility and the dramatic
and sensational possibilities of this encounter.

Hill’s ghost stories are consciously literary creations. Beginning with The Woman in Black, she revels in the long shadow of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw. She makes allusions to Wilkie Collins and throughout Dolly and The Mist in the Mirror (first published in 1992, now reissued in hardback), Hill’s descriptive writing — the recurrent evocation of setting — recalls Dickens’s famous ‘fog’ passage at the beginning of Bleak House. For Hill, preferring setting to plot, setting ultimately becomes as significant a player in the development of her ghost stories as any of her human protagonists.

Her approach to writing ghost stories suggests the Christmas game of charades, when the family dressing-up box is cheerfully ransacked for all its musty and outlandish accoutrements. Hill marshals the ingredients traditional to her genre: an isolated house of indeterminate antiquity; obligingly atmospheric weather conditions; half-forgotten secrets, ancient enmities, broken families; a sense of isolation, of timelessness and, above all, of something brooding, sensed but not seen.

As in many of her novels, Hill’s narrators in Dolly and The Mist in the Mirror are men; both are orphans, both lacking the ordinary emotional attachments. Edward Cayley, the narrator of Dolly, ‘was not a cowardly boy, though he had a natural cautiousness’. Essential to the success of these stories is that, up to a point, Hill’s heroes are sceptical and unimaginative: we cannot easily dismiss their visions as idle fancy.