SOURCE: "Poet's Pains," in Times Literary Supplement, No. 3680, September 15, 1972, p. 1041.

In the following review, the critic highlights the theme of insanity in The Bird of Night.

There have been clues here and there in her previous books that Susan Hill was, like many of the rest of us today, troubled and fascinated by the apparently arbitrary way in which human beings are dismissed as "mad", by the possibility that the so-called insane are saner than the world cares to admit. But even considering the wide range she has so far covered, it would have been a rare guess that hit on the subject of Miss Hill's new and strange novel. The Bird of Night is in the form of an old scholar's ruminative memoir, a last tribute to the only relationship that has in eighty years really counted, his painful, patient, generous love for the mad poet Francis...