The Woman Behind ‘The Woman in Black’: A Q&A with Author Susan Hill

February 9, 2012

Many Americans only know “The Woman In Black” as that new movie with the Harry Potter kid in it. Ask any Brit, however, and you’re likely to hear about how the Susan Hill novel it’s based on has been in circulation since 1983, and about its many existing adaptations — including a theatrical version that’s been running in London’s West End for more than twenty years. Hill loves the new movie (which opens this weekend, and does indeed star Daniel Radcliffe), despite being “not much of a film person.” Here’s what the author had to say about ghosts, fiction, and the process of letting go.

Word & Film: Modern technology has drastically changed the way people interact with their environments (and it’s certainly changed contemporary fiction). As a writer, is it freeing or more constrictive to try and inhabit the minds of characters who don’t have access to our modern advancements?

Susan Hill: It’s very liberating. I’ve no idea why there is such a burst of contemporary interest in ghosts and ghost stories … but they have always been part of every oral and written storytelling culture in the world, going far back – it’s all to do with man’s permanent quest to find out if there is life after death but people who do not have a formal religion or even believe in a God are often drawn to other things.

W&F: I know that The Woman In Black is modeled after the traditional English ghost story, but I thought I also detected a little H.P. Lovecraft in the narration as well. Did his fiction influence you? (If not, I bet he enjoyed some of the same classics that you did.)

SH: I’ve never read Lovecraft. I have only read very classic traditional English ghost stories, other than Henry James, who wrote some magnificent short ones as well as the longer Turn of the Screw. He, Dickens, and M.R. James are my influences.

W&F: This novel has stayed very much alive since it was written, thanks to various adaptations, and each one brings its own changes to the original story. At this point, does the story really feel like it’s still “yours,” or has it become a sort of an independent entity?

SH: Once you finish a book you let it go out into the world to seek its fortune. This one has done rather well but the original book is still there, adaptations et cetera just use it to make their own creation based on it, in different media. I like that very much and it’s always interesting to see how other people mold it. I either like what they do or I don’t – I love the play and this new film, disliked the TV version in the UK … but really, it’s no longer mine. Every reader re-creates a novel in their own imagination anyway. It’s only entirely the writer’s when nobody else has read it.

W&F: Do people wind up sharing tales with you about their own personal paranormal encounters?

SH: No, oddly, they never do. But remember I have written fifty-four books, of which only four are ghost stories, so there is an awful lot more to talk about!

Tags: Daniel Radcliffe, England, Ghosts, Horror, Susan Hill, The Woman in Black