![]() ![]() Neither is order restored by the closing pages. ![]() Her excessive revenge knows no compassion, and recognizes no boundaries of place and time. In spectral form, she repeatedly inflicts suffering on families by causing the death of their children. In her physical form, she refuses to submit to Victorian patriarchal values by attempting to reclaim her illegitimate child. The protagonist of the novel, the eponymous woman in black, resists the lot of the so-called fallen woman. Set primarily during the 1860s, The Woman in Black exposes Victorian hypocrisy towards the unmarried mother, and indirectly probes the quasi-Victorian values promulgated in the 1980s, during the first term of a Conservative right-wing government. The contention is that Hill's novel mediates women's anxieties about motherhood and autonomy during the early 1980s when the institution of the family in Britain was an ideological battleground. Principally, however, she offers a reading of the novel that engages with its immediate historical context. Scullion interprets the novel from several critical perspectives: feminist, psychological, biographical, generic and intertextual. In addition, it offers a social critique of motherhood and contemporary rhetoric surrounding the family. ![]() It is a popular ghost story that has been successfully adapted for the London stage. ![]() Susan Hill's novel The Woman in Black (1983) is a radical example of women's Gothic horror. ![]()
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