After the burial, his eye is caught by a row of 'twenty or so children' watching the 'mournful proceedings' through the railings of the schoolyard. The church where Mrs Drablow's funeral takes place is next to a school and, as he enters the graveyard, he notices 'the sound of children's voices'. Arthur the narrator knows this, but his younger self does not. We see that it is all, somehow, to do with children. The not-told-ness of the truth must be apparent to the reader in advance of any actual discovery, as here in Mr Bentley's oddly careful answer to a simple question. Another convention of the ghost story – obeyed by both James and Hill – is that the protagonist is not told a truth that he or she will go on to discover. The reader notices the tremor of narrative unease that is the sign of something not being said.

''According to everything we've been told about Mrs Drablow,' he said carefully, 'no, there were no children'.' 'Children': the word sends him off into his unspoken thoughts. The narration makes us feel Mr Bentley's silence, pausing to notice the yellow-grey fog outside the office window and the tolling of a church bell. ''Children.' Mr Bentley fell silent for a few moments, and rubbed at the pane with his finger, as though to clear away the obscurity.' Mr Bentley, his bluff employer, tells him that Mrs Drablow was made a widow early in her marriage. She will derive her supernatural frissons from the characters' feelings – and our feelings – about children.Īrthur Kipps, a young solicitor, is sent by the head of his small London firm to remote Crythin Gifford to recover and sort through the papers of a recently dead client, Mrs Alice Drablow. In The Woman in Black, Susan Hill, expert in the conventions of the Victorian ghost story, seizes on this thought. 'The turn of the screw' because a ghost story involving a child is peculiarly unsettling, or horrible. Douglas says that his story has no title, though his own phrase has given James his. It involves two children ('Two children give two turns!' exclaims one of the listeners). He will trump the story with his own, a narrative written by his sister's governess many years before, which he reads aloud to the company 'round the hearth'. 'The child gives the effect another turn of the screw,' he says. I n the frame narrative of Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, the narrator's friend Douglas, who has been listening to a companion tell a ghost story one Christmas Eve, reflects on the fact that it has involved a little boy.

The woman in black by susan hill