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"But the feelings that must accompany the death of someone as close to my heart and bound up with my own being as it was possible to be, I knew then, in the nursery of Eel Marsh House."

It's not just betrayal that's made the woman in black the way she it. It's actual heartbreak. Sure, the accident was no one's fault—but she's desperate to blame anyone, and so she blames her entire community.

"But it seemed most likely that only a blood relation would have given, or rather, been forced to give her illegitimate child for adoption to another woman…"

Arthur figures out that Jennet's family betrayed her: the people she loved wouldn't let her keep her child.

"She was not welcome at her parents' house and the man—the child's father—had gone abroad for good."

Jennet had lost everything important to her and the people who should care didn't. Her parents kicked her out, the father of the child ran away and she has to lose her son and then he dies. This starts to make the reader feel sorry for Jennet and start to understand what she is doing.

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"But for today I had had enough. Enough of solitude and no sound save the water and the moaning wind and the melancholy calls of the birds, enough of monotonous grayness, enough of this gloomy old house."

The empty and lonely surroundings at Eel Marsh House are starting to get to Arthur.

"Behind me, out on the marshes, all was still and silent; save for that movement of the water, the pony and trap might never have existed."

Setting having an effect on a narrator. The marshy, creepy goodness of Eel Marsh House adds to the tension that is felt as Arthur explores the house

"I must have a candle, some light, however faint and frail, to keep me company."

The emptiness of the house is so eerie that even a candle would count as company right now.

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"But to harm who? Was not everyone connected with that sad story now dead?"

Why is the woman in black still seeking revenge? She has killed everyone who has wronged her. Can it really be called revenge if she's not hurting the people who hurt her

"There was nothing else the woman could do to me, surely, I had endured and survived."

The word "surely" foreshadows we immediately know that the woman isn't done with him yet and will make him suffer more.

"Our baby son had been thrown clear, clear against another tree. He lay crumpled on the grass below it, dead."

Jennet has her final revenge on Arthur by taking away his child.

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"I did not believe in ghosts. Or rather, until this day, I had not done so, and whatever stories I had heard of them I had, like most rational, sensible young men, dismissed as nothing more than stories indeed."

From this we can infer that at the end of story Arthur will believe in ghosts and the supernatural (foreshadowing).

"It seems to me, Mr. Daily," I said, "that I have seen whatever ghost haunts Eel Marsh and that burial ground."

Now that Arthur is no longer in denial about the existence of ghosts he can speak to Mr. Daily openly about the whole crazy affair. But he's still using very rational, measured language to talk about it: "it seems to me." which creates irony of the subject.

"But no one had been there. The room had been empty. Anyone who had just left it must have come out into the corridor and confronted me…"

The inexplicable moving furniture when no one else is there is a very well known ghost move which hints towards there being a ghost with him. Spooking the reader and increasing tension.

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The novel follows a literary tradition of Gothic stories that typically include isolated houses or castles, hauntings and induce fear in the reader. Susan Hill explains that she set out to write a ghost story, inspired by her love for Henry James' novel, The Turn of the Screw. She read a range of ghost stories to inspire her and made a list of elements that a ghost story should contain. One of the key features of these stories, as well as the ghost itself, is a 'most unimaginative and straightforward' person who 'most certainly did not believe in such things as ghosts'. We see this character clearly in the rational Arthur Kipps.

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DESRIPTION- Arthur is the main protagonist of the story. He tellsthe events several years later, although he is clearly still internally haunted by the events at Crythin Gifford many years earlier, when he visited Eel Marsh House as young solicitor. He is rational and pragmatic, who at first casts aside apparitions as features of reality. In the end, he has his wife and young child unfairly taken from him.

“I clung to the prosaic, the visible and tangible.”

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"Then, as it was so bright that it hurt my eyes to go on staring at it, I looked up ahead and saw, as if rising out of the water itself, a tall, gaunt house of gray stone with a slate roof, that now gleamed steelily in the light."

DESCRIPTION- Eel Marsh House, the large, forbidding house where Alice Drablow lived out the last of her days. It's big, unoccupied, filled with mysterious papers, and cut off from the mainland.

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DESCRIPTION-The Woman in Black is the ghost of Jennet Humfrye, filled with anger and vengeance over the death of her young son years before. She is bitter about giving up her child to Alice Drablow, and this increases after she watches him die in Alice’s care. As the Woman in Black, she returns as the pale, wasted version of herself from just before her death, and causes the death of a child every time that she is seen.

“I shall kill us both before I let him go.”

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DESCRIPTION- Sam is a large, friendly, prosperous local man who befriends Arthur on his trip to Crythin Gifford. Aside from Keckwick, he is the only person in the town who offers to help Arthur. He returns to Eel Marsh House to help him when worried about his welfare and lends Arthur his dog, Spider, to keep him company. In the end, he is the character who reveals the truth to Arthur.

"big man, with a beefy face and huge raw-looking hands”

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DESCRIPTION- Mr Jerome is a local land agent, who dealt with Alice Drablow before her death. Throughout much of his appearances in the book, Jerome lives in fear of the Woman in Black (there is even a chapter named ‘Mr Jerome is Afraid) although crucially, he never reveals the cause of his fear to Arthur. Jerome often appears as a ‘broken man’ – it is later revealed that he lost a child to the woman."

" I'm afraid I can't offer you help, Mr. Kipps. Oh, no."

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DESCRIPTION- Keckwick is the driver of the pony and trap, who delivers Arthur to and from Eel Marsh House – the only character (barring Sam Daily at the end) who will set foot near the place. He is a quiet character, who barely says a word to Arthur throughout their journies. However, he does represent Arthur’s one link to the town - helpful when considering his father died in the marshes.

“For answer, he simply pulled on the pony's rein”

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DESCRIPTION-Mr Bentley is Arthur’s employer, who is the one who sends Arthur off to Crythin Gifford in the first place. Although Arthur doesn’t blame Bentley for the events that follow, it is clear that Bentley at least partially blames himself. Through compliance towards his boss’s orders, not only did Arthur need to venture north to Eel Marsh House, but he also remained there even when it was clear that something was wrong – he felt a need to get the job done.

"He had always blamed himself for what happened to me.”

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"Mr. Jerome looked frozen, pale, his throat moving as if he were unable to utter."

Mr. Jerome is truly afraid, but he's not going to give any clues as to why. Is it because he doesn't want to scare Arthur or because he is too scared to say?

"For how long I sat there, in extremes of despair and fearfulness, I do not know."

Eel Marsh House sure draws out some extreme emotions in Arthur. Shows how scared Arthur is and what the house is like reflects in Arthur's emotions.

"But at my feet, the dog Spider began to whine, a thin, pitiful, frightened moan, and to back away from the door a little and press against my legs."

The dog can either smell something is bad or maybe because the  WIB is a ghost she is having an affect on the dogs emotions.

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"Like an old wound, it gave off a faint twinge now and again, but less and less often, less and less painfully… Of late, it had been like the outermost ripple of a pool, merely the faint memory of a memory."

The thing about memories is that they never go away completely. As well as that because it's chapter one it foreshadows something bad is going to happen.

"Could I not be free of it at least for that blessed time, was there no way of keeping the memory, and the effects it had upon me, at bay…"

Arthur wants to never think back on that memory again, but it keeps resurfacing.

"…and because the cry of that child would never, I was sure, leave me for the rest of my life."

It's hard to ignore the call of a child who appears to be dying in anguish, and a ghost child is even harder to ignore. That's something Arthur and the woman in black have in common.

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Susan Hill (born 1942) is an English author of both fiction and non-fiction works. Many of her texts are written in a descriptive gothic style. She has expressed a keen interest in the traditional English ghost story, enjoying its use of suspense and atmosphere to create an impact. Her novella The Woman in Black was turned into a play in 1987 and has continued to run in the West End since.

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To give birth out of wedlock was frowned upon as recently as the mid-twentieth century. However, in the Victorian era, the situation was even worse, as many unmarried women were forced to give up their babies for adoption. It was deemed that no woman could raise a child born outside marriage and remain in ‘polite society.’ In The Woman in Black, the unmarried Jennet is forced to give up her child.

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The Victorian era describes the period in which Queen Victoria sat on the English throne between 1837 and 1901. Whilst this was a time of industrial revolution, it was also an extremely harsh time to live, and the differences between the lives of the richest and the poorest were exacerbated. The Victorian era was a period of great change. In this time, the population of England doubled – from 16.8 million 1851 to over 30 million in 1901. Many of the events of The Woman in Black take place in this harsh period of English history.

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Healthcare was more of a luxury at the time, and medicine was nowhere near as advanced today, Many diseases were rife, and childbirth and poverty were very real dangers to people living in the era. As a result, a middle class person may expect to live to 45 at the time, whereas a working class person would have been lucky to live half that time. In The Woman in Black Jennet Humfrye dies from a wasting disease at a relatively young age, this would have been far more common than now.

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In the Victorian era and the early twentieth century (when the different plot elements of The Woman in Black take place) science and understanding of the world was far less advanced than in the present day. As a result, people at the time would be far more likely to believe that unexplained events were the result of supernatural activity. This lack of scientific enlightenment makes the era highly suitable for a story featuring supernatural elements.

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The setting for Eel Marsh House is in the north of England. Even today, the north of the country is far more sparsely populated than the south, but in the time when the story was set, this would have been even more so the case. This idea of remote isolation adds to the cold, ghostly atmosphere that runs throughout the novella. Susan Hill herself was born and raised in Scarborough, a seaside town in North Yorkshire.

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SIMILE- "never known my knees to tremble and my flesh to creep, and then to turn cold as stone”

METAPHORS- "never known my heart to give a great lurch, as if it would almost leap up into my dry mouth”

ALLITERATION-  “stretched and strained across her bones, so that it gleamed with a curious, blue-white sheen, and her eyes seemed sunken back into her head”

VARIED ADJECTIVES-  “so pathetically wasted, so pale and gaunt with disease"

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HORROR-  Details are included to deliberately make the reader feel tense or scared, for example the description of the woman’s ‘malevolent’ look or her pale, wasted face.

DEATH-  Gothic texts often deal with the issue of death, and The Woman in Black contains horrific scenes of death as Nathaniel Drablow and Arthur’s wife and child are horrifically killed

SETTINGS AND SUPERNATURALS-A gloomy, decaying setting is used in Gothic texts, (e.g. Eel Marsh House) as are elements of the supernatural (ghosts and apparitions)

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Arthur Kipps is at home with his family at Christmas Eve, when his wife’s children, when they begin telling ghost stories. Arthur grows increasingly uncomfortable with their stories, and eventually storms out of the house, clearly disturbed. This is when he decides to write down what happened to him many years ago. Arthur tells how when he was 23 years old, he was a young solicitor in London. He is sent on a business trip by his boss, Mr Bentley, to attend her funeral and sort out her affairs. She lives in a remote place called Eel Marsh House, a few miles from a town named Crythin Gifford. He sets off north on the train.

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The Journey North/ The Funeral of Mrs Drablow

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The Journey North/ The Funeral of Mrs Drablow

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Arthur experiences an increasingly cold and uncomfortable trip up north. He is reading through Alice Drablow’s files when a man introduces himself as Sam Daily. He takes some interest in the file, and complains about life in the countryside. He offers Arthur a ride in his automobile. Arthur is dropped at the hotel, where the innkeeper acts strangely when he tries to speak about Alice Drablow. Arthur sleeps well and is picked up by Mr Jerome the next day. Almost no one is at the service but Arthur sees a young woman dressed all in black, who is suffering from a wasting disease. Mr Jerome acts extremely distressed when Arthur mentions the lady, claiming he saw no one. Arthur departs for Eel Marsh House.

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Across the Causeway/ TheSound of a Pony and Trap

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Across the Causeway/ TheSound of a Pony and Trap

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A man named Keckwick takes Arthur to Eel Marsh House. It is over a causeway, and becomes separated from the mainland when the tide comes up. Keckwick leaves. Arthur is looking over the grounds, when he finds a burial ground. As he looks at some graves, he sees the woman dressed in black again in the distance. This time she is looking at him, malevolently. He runs over, but can’t find her. He starts to think she may be a ghost. He goes into the house. He realises it will be a long job, and Keckwick will return soon, so he begins to walk across the causeway. Along the path, he hears the sound of a pony and trap sinking in the mud and a child dying. He runs back inside, tries to get into a door (that is locked) and then falls asleep on the sofa. Keckwick picks him up at 2am.

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Arthur decides that he wants no more to do with the Drablow affair, and attempts to get Mr Jerome to sort the papers instead. However, Jerome seems terrified by the idea and refuses. He says vague things about stories and ghouls. Arthur then writes a letter to Mr Bentley to tell him that the Eel Marsh House job may take a while. Arthur has a bike ride, and then has dinner with Sam Daily. Arthur decides to spend the next two nights at Eel Marsh House to get the work done. Sam doesn’t think that it is a great idea to go alone and so lends him his dog, Spider. Spider is only a small dog, but offers Arthur some comfort.

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In the Nursery/ Whistle and I’ll Come to You

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In the Nursery/ Whistle and I’ll Come to You

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Arthur returns to Eel Marsh House with Spider. He goes through the papers, and studies the graves once more, before going to bed. He awakes in the middle of the night with Spider standing at the bedroom door, growling. He follows Spider down the corridor to the locked room, and hears a sound behind him. Spider then calms down. After returning briefly to town the next day, Arthur finds some letters to Alice from someone named Jennet. It seems Jennet gave up her child for the Drablows to raise. Spider then hears a noise and they race outside – it is the ghostly noise of the pony and trap again. Returning back to the house, Arthur finds the formerly locked door wide open. In the room is a nursery, with a chair rocking by itself. He can’t figure it out, so returns to bed. When he awakes, it’s windy and dark. He takes Spider outside. Spider hears a whistle and races into the marsh – Arthur has to struggle to save her from sinking. As he is walking back to the house with Spider, Arthur looks up and sees the Woman in Black watching him from the nursery window.

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When Arthur awakes, Sam Daily is at the house. Arthur explains all that he has seen to Sam, and they return to Crythin Gifford. Back at the inn, Arthur finds the death certificate of Nathaniel Drablow Jennet’s son, who died in the marsh. Sam confirms that Jennet got pregnant out of wedlock, and so Alice adopted the boy. Jennet came to live with them to see the boy, but he died whilst playing in a pony and trap as it sunk in the marsh. Jennet saw from the window and it drove her insane. She kept haunting the town after she died every time she has been seen in the town since, a child has soon died. Arthur leaves Crythin Gifford, marries a woman named Stella, and has a child named Joseph. One day, outside of London, Stella and Joseph ride a pony and trap at a fair. Arthur is watching them being driven around before seeing the Woman in Black watching him. She steps in front of the trap and causes a massive accident Joseph dies at the scene, whilst Stella dies in hospital weeks later. Arthur says that this is the end of his story.

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"tiny hamlet... tucked snugly into a bend of the river below, white walls basking in the afternoon sunshine"

DESCRIPTION- Where Arthur Kipps lives as a grown adult. After me had encountered the WIB.

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"… There's the drowned churches and the swallowed-up village," he chuckled. "Those are particularly fine examples of 'nothing to see.' And we've a good wild run of an abbey with a handsome graveyard—you can get to it at low tide."

DESCRIPTION- Crythin Gifford is a dreary, bleak town filled with secrets, somewhere on the coast of England. The surrounding wilderness all but swallows up the town—and literally swallows some things, like the pony and trap. Humans and human buildings are overshadowed by the sheer force of nature, and by the sheer force of the past.

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The Woman in Black is Arthur Kipps's story. He makes this clear at the end of the first chapter of the book, when he commits to telling the story:

"I decided at once that it should be, at least during my lifetime, a story for my eyes only. I was the one who had been haunted and who had suffered—not the only one, no, but surely, I thought, the only one left alive…"

The entire story is told from Arthur's point of view, which makes us experience all the confusion, realization, and terror at the same time as he does. We aren't privy to the larger picture, just as Arthur is not privy to it until it is far too late. Even though he's telling the story from the present, we almost get to experience the mystery and horror of the journey ourselves.

There is some hindsight involved. Arthur is older and wiser now, which means that he can see the whole arc of the story. In the story the woman in black seems to be controlling Arthur (as we can understand why she kills). So it comes across as she is the one telling it. Which would be why Stella and Joseph had to die.

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Christmas tale- The story opens with Arthur Kipps at home with his family and enjoying a pleasant Christmas Eve. However, when the talk of the evening turns to ghost stories, which is when Arthur has a flashback and the real exposition shows. Arthur Kipps is a young solicitor who's heading off on a business trip to tie up the affairs of a newly deceased Mrs. Drablow. He's bound for a small town called Crythin Gifford, where he'll be sorting papers at the creepily named Eel Marsh House.

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To the country side- When Arthur gets to Crythin Gifford, he encounters lots of fog and uneasy townsfolk who don't want anything to do with him, or to have to talk of Mrs. Drablow. We know that something is wrong and we know it even more when all sorts of strange supernatural things start happening at the house after Arthur sees a scary-looking woman in black at Mrs. Drablow's funeral.

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The ghost of Eel Marsh house- As Arthur explores Eel Marsh House, things start to happen during night. This is when he realizes that the woman in black is actually a ghost.

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Samuel Daily says- When Arthur brings up his findings to Sam Daily, the whole story falls into place. We find out that the ghost is of a woman named Jennet Humfrye who haunts Eel Marsh House and Crythin Gifford because she's seeking revenge and releasing hatred about the death of her child. But as Arthur heads home all the tension becomes relieved as the reader thinks that will be the end.

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Series of unfortunate events- The resolution happens a couple years later, when Arthur has married his girlfriend Stella and had a child named Joseph. He sees the woman in black again and his wife and child get into a terrible accident and die. That's when everything really gets resolved with the WIB getting revenge.