The woman in black

The Woman in Black is a ghost story by the English writer Susan Hill, first published in 1983. It is a short novel, told in the tradition of the Victorian ghost story, and it has been adapted for television, film and the stage.

Arthur Kipps is a young solicitor whose firm sends him to deal with the estate of a woman who lived by herself in a house surrounded by marshland. The house, the town and the people in it are not what he expected, and what begins as an ordinary piece of legal business leaves him with something he cannot put down. Years later, with a family of his own, he is asked at Christmas to tell a ghost story, and instead of inventing one he writes out the account of the case he handled as a young man. The book keeps the details of the haunting off the page for as long as it can, and it depends on the reader sharing the solicitor's reasonable assumption that there is a rational explanation for everything he sees.

Hill has said that the story was suggested by a passage in Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, and the novel has since been adapted as a television film in 1989, as a film starring Daniel Radcliffe in 2012, and as a stage play by Stephen Mallatratt that ran in the West End for more than thirteen thousand performances.