SOURCE: "Cold Enclosures: The Fiction of Susan Hill," in Twentieth-Century Women Novelists, edited by Thomas F. Staley, Barnes & Noble Books, 1982, pp. 81-103.

In the following essay, Jackson approaches Hill's fiction in terms of a tension between detachment from and desire for life, identifying the idea of coldness as its "imaginative centre" and relating its principal themes and motifs to feminist concerns.

Susan Hill's fictional output has been substantial and has been well received by the English literary establishment. Between 1961 and 1976, she published nine novels, two short story anthologies, one collection of radio plays, and received recognition with the Somerset Maugham Award in 1971, the Whitbread Literary Award in 1972, and the Rhys Memorial Prize in 1972. Her success enabled her to be financially independent as a writer from 1963 onwards. Unlike many of her contemporaries, Susan Hill does not seem to be primarily concerned with the subject, or the subjection, of women...