Susan Hill's 'From The Heart' Book Review

CONTAINS MAJOR SPOILERS 

The first time I ever read a Susan Hill novel was back in 2010 whilst studying an access course at York college. We were introduced to her Gothic novel The Woman in Black in our literature class. As a lover of horror and ghost stories, I was surprised that I'd never heard of her or her work. Hill has fast become one of my favourite authors over the years. She has a way of merging characters so realistic they almost seem to come off the page, along with story lines, arcs and twists that you can't see coming, and which sometimes can floor you with sheer emotion, (especially if you're a book lover like me and extremely sensitive to fictional characters and their life stories 😉)

So of course I was very excited to devour this most recent book by Hill. Though I've read a couple of her short stories in the past, I've mainly stuck to her more ghoulish work. Stories about possessed dolls, Victorian men who mess around with corpses souls, and my most recent one about a man who is killed off by a swarm of giant moths. (I know, ew!) 👻

Susan Hill

I only very recently received From the Heart on Christmas day as a gift, and I finished it all in one day. It was un-put-downable, and all I wanted was more and more of the story with each turned page. Once it was over, I felt a little disheartened and conflicted at how it all ended. But let me start at the beginning first. 

"You're a young woman. You can choose. Which career to pursue. Who to have sex with. Who to marry and have children - or not - with. 

Step into the shoes of Olive. You're a happy, open-hearted girl, your (tricky) mother is dead and you live with your father in a solid, Edwardian hose with apple trees in the garden. Your passion for books gets you easily into University, where the world is surely waiting for you. 

There, you meet a boy. But then you make a mistake - the kind any one of us could make - and face an impossible choice. You are young, still and full of hope. You can't possibly know how that mistake will sit in your heart. Or that when you get a job as a teacher you will fall in love with an older colleague. But the affair must stay secret; the world won't have it any other way. 

All you have ever wanted is for your heart to be free. But you are living in a time and place where freedoms we now take for granted had the power to destroy."

From the very first page we are thrown into Olive's life, who is living with her widowed father not long before she starts University. (It's clear that this novel is set way back when, but unfortunately there's no exact year. So from a brief reference of WWII in one of the earlier chapters, I'm going to guess that it's set anywhere from the 1950's onwards. This will also become more obvious as I write about the things that happen to Olive.)

She meets a boy there named Malcolm whom she reluctantly begins to date, and ultimately who she loses her virginity to. Although she consents to this, she can't help but regret what they've done, and always feels the need to get away from him and his 'suffocating' family. Something just doesn't feel right for her, and for the rest of the novel we see Malcolm (and his mum!) constantly begging her to be with him and marry him through gushing letters. Unfortunately for Malcolm, Olive never responds and does every thing she can to cut him out of her life. Although I understood later in the book why this had to happen, I did feel her to be a tad harsh toward him. 

A few months down the line, Olive realises that she is pregnant. As she is incredibly naive and ignorant to the consequences of pregnancy, she does every thing she can to find out what it is she is supposed to do now that she's unmarried and with child. After a lot of struggle, she finally manages to see a doctor, who tells her that abortion is not the answer, (despite the fact she didn't mention that she wanted one), and that she should have the baby adopted, as it will 'give it a better life from the start, as being an unmarried mother isn't fun.' 

Now, I know this is set decades ago, and society was like this once upon a time, but I really can't help but get mad when I read this kind of stuff. As an unmarried mother myself, the first time I became pregnant was scary enough, and what made it worse was the judgemental people around me who seemed to think that either a termination, or giving it up for adoption were somehow better options for me and my unborn child. (And yes, I'm being serious. Not to put a damper on this review but in that moment I could relate to Olive more than anyone else in my life. Judgemental heartless people are what is 'no fun' when you're an unmarried single parent. Not the baby. And it makes me sad and angry that unmarried pregnant women still have this awful stigma attached to them but that's another rant for another time.) Anyway...

With no help and advice from the doctors or her father, she checks herself into St. Jude's in Tremear. (You know, the standard disgusting 'Churches' where women were forced to give their babies up for adoption once having them.) Already I knew Olive was doomed. And once she had her baby, the story became harder to read for me. Hill is a mother herself, and so the way she describes Olive and her newborn baby James' first moments together resonated with me so much, and were words that I couldn't ever have put more beautifully. She writes;

"She and he were woven together, threads going this way and that to make up a whole. The word 'love' seemed inadequate to describe her feeling for him and she did not feel it only in her heart but in her gut and in the farthest reaches of her brain."

As I've said already, this doesn't end well, and whilst reading the part where they take her baby away from her, it was hard to hold back tears. As a mother, it completely broke my heart. I've read other works of fiction where these abhorrent Churches are part of the story; where pregnant mothers are made to do chores, work in factories whilst almost at the end of their trimesters, only to give birth and then separated forever from their child. But what kills me more is that this actually happened, to millions of women. The sorrow I hold for them in my heart is too much, fiction or not.

Olive moves back in with her father briefly, until she finds a flat of her own. Eventually, she lands herself a teaching job, specifically English Literature as it's the only subject she was ever passionate about. There she meets fellow teachers Sylvia and Thea, who she gets along with very well. A few months into the school term however, Olive falls ill with a fever/nervous exhaustion, and is bed bound for 9 days. She is cared for by her colleague Thea, and the two unexpectedly fall in love.

Again, because this is set so long ago, they have to keep their relationship a secret. Olive wants things to get more serious between them, asking if they can live together, but Thea always seems to have some excuse not to. I never trusted Thea from the start, but I will say that it doesn't end well for them either. Ultimately Olive is left betrayed, and has her heart broken all over again, and is basically fired from her teaching job because of a 'parent complaint that a student saw them together.' Her boss tells her that if she moves away as far as possible, she will give her a glowing reference. 

Now this is where the story kind of abruptly ends. There's no more depth or explanation as to exactly what or why Thea did the things she did, or how and why Olive was fired. The story ends with Olive as a teaching assistant somewhere in Cumbria, still living her life day to day, and still forcing herself to forget about James. 

This is what didn't sit right with me. All the way through the book I was hoping that somehow her and her baby would be reunited. That maybe she knew someone, who knew someone who'd adopted him. Or even that Malcolm and his parents had tracked them down and adopted him, so that when Olive left the church she could have instant access to him. But there wasn't any of that. And the thing is, even if something like that had been woven into the story, it wouldn't have made it any less believable, or far fetched. I feel like despite all of the shit Olive had gone through, somehow getting her son back would have made a brilliant end to a very sad story. 

But I understand what Hill was getting at here. I enjoyed Olive as a character and could relate to her indecisiveness, her constant fear and anxiety of making the wrong choices in life. It's something that haunts me sometimes. Always thinking what if? What if? And I like how the blurb is written out, how it makes it sound like Olive has all of these great things going for her, that she has all of these choices. But in the end, she doesn't have any choices. She's barely in control of her own life. And it's sad but meaningful at the same time, because this is a time when things were truly different. Maybe if it was set now, she would have made the same mistakes...who knows.

With regards to Hill's writing, as always it was just beautiful. Her storytelling is swift and straight to the point without missing out character development, and her descriptions of landscapes and locations breaks the story up well. Every thing she writes is there for a reason, and is all relevant to Olive's story. Basically, she doesn't waffle on like many other authors I enjoy, and her writing style always makes me want to write. Maybe that's why I've written this long ass essay not hours after finishing the book eh 😉

I just want to quickly finish this post with another little paragraph that I loved. It's about when Olive has discovered all of these brilliant writers and poets, and she's just falling in love with the words. That, I can always relate to. Thank you Susan Hill for yet again writing a powerful and poignant story. 

Violet x

"[sic] ...or like Olive, reading in deckchairs beneath the great spreading copper beech. Marlowe was a revelation, so was Webster. Shakespeare took a back seat for the time being. Her head teemed with new words and works, so that not only the lines but the lives, and the truths told, the golden images and dark metaphors might at any moment come spilling out and walk about on the grass."

📚

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