Author Susan Hill on her hit ghost story The Woman in Black

Millions have been terrified by Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black — on the page, on the stage and on the big screen — and the very first of them was the young woman typing it up from tape recordings dictated by the author in her Oxfordshire home.

The gripping ghost story, set in and around Eel Marsh House in the coastal marshes of eastern England, was actually penned — and that is the correct word — in the rural comforts of a house in Beckley with the reassuringly lovely name of Midsummer Cottage.

Already an established novelist, Susan had written no fiction for some years but wished to return to her craft in a book in a different style to her earlier successes. Rereading ghost stories at the time, she found herself wondering why no one tackled a full-length book with haunting at its heart. She says: “I thought I would see if it could be done.”

With her husband, the distinguished Shakespeare scholar Stanley Wells, away at his day job at the Oxford University Press, Susan required assistance with their five-year-old daughter Jessica while she got on with her writing. This was supplied, mornings only, by a young medical student who is now a well-respected GP just outside Oxford.

“I only wrote with pen and ink,” says Susan. “I still do. I needed someone to type it up, and asked my helper if she had any ideas. She said that her sister was doing a shorthand and typing course, and would probably welcome the work. She did.”

Jane Tranter — who was later to become BBC television’s head of drama — found herself unable to read the handwriting. “Nobody can read it,” says Susan, “me included, so I started to use a Dictaphone. Jane said this was great, but she didn’t want to listen to the tapes when she was alone in the house. She was too scared.”

The story of The Woman in Black is so well known as almost to require no rehearsal here. In a sentence or two it concerns the horrors experienced by young lawyer Arthur Kipps when he visits the mist-encircled Eel Marsh House to sort out the affairs of a recently deceased old lady, Mrs Drablow. Moaning winds, ancient churches and graveyards also figure, along with a ghostly coachman.

Published in hardback in 1983, the book hardly set the world on fire.

“It was OK,” says Susan. “It got pleasant reviews and sold OK but then rather vanished from view until the paperback came out.”

A copy was bought at the airport by the stage writer Stephen Mallatratt as he set off on a Greek holiday. He had been asked to come up with a stage show suitable to play in the studio space at the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough, which is run by Alan Ayckbourn, whose plays all open there.

Brought up in Scarborough herself, Susan was flattered to think that one of her books might get an airing there, but hardly thought The Woman in Black would be the right one.

“When he wrote to ask if he could do it I thought the idea was completely mad. The story might work as a film, but how could it work on the stage, with a marshy causeway, a pony and trap, a vast haunted house, steam trains and a London fog?”

Mallatratt’s inspiration was to supply a framing device which finds Arthur Kipps looking back in old age and playing all the characters in the story — with the single exception of himself. This had the result of turning the piece into a two-hander, with the pleasing consequence this has had, then and since, on production costs.

On the current tour, which visits Oxford Playhouse from January 26 to 31, the part of the old Kipps will be played by Malcolm James and that of the younger by Matt Connor. For the experienced Mr James the visit marks a return to a stage on which he has not performed since his student days as an undergraduate at Magdalen College.

The six-week run in Scarborough, under director Robin Herford, appeared to suggest the play had ‘legs’. It took time, how-ever, for these to be fully exer-cised with a run at London’s Fortune Theatre which has now continued since 1989. The production is the longest running West End play, with the obvious exception of The Mousetrap, whose author, Agatha Christie, was also an Oxfordshire resident. Susan and her husband now live in North Norfolk, from where she has viewed the stellar progress of her creation, including the film version starring Daniel Radcliffe, which is now the UK’s biggest-grossing horror movie.

About the just-released sequel, The Woman in Black: Angel of Death, Susan has nothing to say, having barely been involved in it. “I made one suggestion that Eel Marsh House might become a home for wartime evacuees.” This was taken up in the film.

Vulgar as it might seem to introduce the question of money, the interviewer naturally feels constrained to ask about this. Susan doesn’t mind at all.

“I have made a lot of money, about £1.5m. It has been my pension. But this has been over 28 years. To make the really big money from films, of course, you need to be an actor.”

The Woman in Black
* Oxford Playhouse
* January 26-31 
* For tickets, call 01865 305305 or visit oxfordplayhouse.com