This GCSE English Literature quiz will test you on Susan Hill's The Woman in Black. Understanding a text is essential if you expect to analyse and write about it. Comprehension might sound as though it is a simple task, but it can be trickier than it seems. If texts only had a single “message”, authors would not need to expend so many words in expressing it.
The Woman in Black is written as a full-length ghost story in the tradition of M. R. James, Henry James and Charles Dickens. It is richly atmospheric, with evocative descriptions of landscape. Fairly ordinary settings such as a reasonably comfortable home, a small town, and a small island are revealed to harbour a terrifying presence. This presence, in its turn, is no more than that ordinary figure - a mother. And yet, such a terrifying mother, wasted as she is by disease, grief and the desire for vengeance!