SOURCE: "Weathering the Calm," in Times Literary Supplement, No. 3751, January 25, 1974, p. 69.

Below, the critic considers the representation of grief in In the Springtime of the Year and its effect on the novel.

Some novels conjure up discreet, well lit interiors, where you notice people's accents, or opinions, or possessions. Others seem to happen in a moody, unpredictable out of doors, where what you attend to—though it sounds paradoxical—is the inner life, the spiritual "weather". Susan Hill's fiction is very clearly of this second kind. She invests her real energy in emotional events everything that is merely circumstantial or descriptive is tacitly excluded; there is no gossip, no clutter, no social masquerade. Places matter a lot, especially landscapes, but never names or dates. Although each of her books has had its own distinctive atmosphere, almost its own colour (the iron-grey of Flanders trenches in Strange Meeting, the...