SOURCE: "Susan Hill's Fiction," in The Uses of Fiction: Essays on the Modern Novel in Honour of Arnold Kettle, edited by Douglas Jefferson and Graham Martin, The Open University Press, 1982, pp. 273-85.

Below, Muir assesses the achievement of Hill's fiction up to her hiatus from writing, discussing her narrative method, characterization, and themes.

When Susan Hill, to the dismay of her admirers, announced that she had decided to write no more novels, her reasons were complex. It was partly her feeling that the novel on which she was working, and which she destroyed, was inferior to her best, partly her newly found happiness in marriage and motherhood, and partly, one suspects, her realization that she ought to let her talent lie fallow. She had been writing since her schooldays and her mature work, written between the ages of twenty-six and thirty-two, included two volumes of short stories, a...