“a story of haunting and evil, fear and confusion, horror and tragedy”
Arthur Kipps, narrating, Chapter 1 (Christmas Eve)
Arthur announces his story in three pairs of abstract nouns linked by and, a list that grows heavier as it goes, ending on tragedy rather than fear. It works as a promise and a warning at once: the reader knows from the first chapter that this will end in loss, so the suspense is not whether something terrible happens but how. The pairs also set out the novel’s range, from the supernatural (haunting, evil) to the psychological (fear, confusion) to the human cost.
“a fog that choked and blinded, smeared and stained”
Arthur Kipps, narrating, Chapter 2 (A London Particular)
The London fog is personified as an attacker, and the four verbs move from the body (choked, blinded) to the dirt it leaves behind (smeared, stained). Hill uses fog from the start as a sign of danger that cannot be seen, and it returns on the causeway in Chapter 6. The young Arthur is cheerfully unbothered by it, which is the first of many warnings he ignores.
“half-hints and dark mutterings”
Arthur Kipps, narrating, Chapter 4 (The Funeral of Mrs Drablow), at the lunch after the funeral
Arthur is growing impatient with grown men who will not say what they mean about Mrs Drablow. The phrase captures how Hill builds mystery: through what the townspeople leave unsaid. Arthur hears the silence as small-town superstition; the reader begins to hear it as fear. Edexcel used this line to introduce a question on how mystery is created, and it is a good starting point for the theme of silence.
“some terrible wasting disease”
Arthur Kipps, narrating, Chapter 4, at the funeral
Arthur’s first explanation for the woman’s appearance is medical and sympathetic: he assumes she is ill and even resolves to offer her help. The rational explanation is also, in its way, true, since Jennet did waste away before she died. Hill lets the reader feel pity for her before fear, which prepares for the moral complexity of the ending.
“desperate, yearning malevolence”
Arthur Kipps, narrating, Chapter 5 (Across the Causeway), in the graveyard
Arthur struggles for words and settles on a paradox. Yearning is longing, a feeling of lack; malevolence is the wish to do harm. Joined together, they are the whole of Jennet’s story in three words: a mother who wants what was taken from her, and hates whoever took it. The adjective desperate adds that the feeling is beyond control, which makes her more frightening than a simple villain.
“I did not believe in ghosts”
Arthur Kipps, narrating, Chapter 5, after he flees the graveyard
A short, flat declarative from a rational man, and the past tense does the work: he goes on to explain that this was true only until that day. It marks the turning point in his development, the moment the sceptic is forced to consider what he has always dismissed. Eduqas quoted this line to frame a question on the events that change his mind.
“It is remarkable how powerful a force simple curiosity can be.”
Arthur Kipps, narrating, Chapter 5, in the hall of Eel Marsh House
Having run from the graveyard in terror, Arthur finds that he still wants an explanation more than he wants to leave. The older narrator comments on his younger self with rueful hindsight. Curiosity is what drives him back to the house and into danger, so this sentence is both a key to his character and a quiet piece of foreshadowing.
“the mist played tricks with sound as well as sight”
Arthur Kipps, narrating, Chapter 6 (The Sound of a Pony and Trap), on the causeway
This is the moment the novel’s fear becomes aural. Robbed of sight by the mist, Arthur must rely on hearing, and even that deceives him, as the sound of the trap seems to come from the wrong direction. The personified mist plays tricks, as if deliberately. Hill makes the reader listen with him. When Eduqas printed this passage in 2025, its examiners reported that most candidates used it to analyse her aural imagery and the disorientation it creates.
“that door was now standing open. Wide open.”
Arthur Kipps, narrating, Chapter 9 (In the Nursery)
The long sentence before this repeats the door again and again, insisting that it had been locked and could not be opened, and that anaphora builds certainty. Then the minor sentence Wide open lands like the door swinging back. Hill uses sentence length as a physical shock: after all Arthur’s reasoning, two words of fact overturn it.
“he is mine, mine, he can never be yours”
Jennet Humfrye, in a letter to her sister Alice, read by Arthur in Chapter 9
Jennet gives her son up and claims him in the same breath. The repeated possessive mine is love, grief and a refusal to let go at once, and the absolute never looks forward to a possession that death does not end. Edexcel used this letter to introduce a question on love, and it is the best evidence that the ghost’s hatred began as a mother’s love.
“I began to doubt my own reality”
Arthur Kipps, narrating, Chapter 10 (Whistle and I’ll Come to You)
After sensing someone pass him on the landing, Arthur has tried every rational explanation and rejected them all. The threat has moved from the house into his mind: a man who doubts his own reality has nothing left to stand on. It is the low point of the reason-against-belief argument that runs through the novel.
“Those who have suffered worst say least”
Samuel Daily, Chapter 11 (A Packet of Letters), naming Mr Jerome and Keckwick
Daily explains the town’s silence that so irritated Arthur. It was never superstition; it was grief too painful to speak of. The line changes how the reader sees every earlier refusal, and it applies to Arthur himself, who has said nothing about his own suffering for years until the Christmas Eve game drives him to write.
“In some violent or dreadful circumstance, a child has died.”
Samuel Daily, Chapter 11, explaining what follows each sighting
The curse is finally stated, in plain words and with a formal, almost legal balance: violent or dreadful. Daily speaks it only after Arthur whispers for him to go on, so Hill delays it for maximum effect. Once the reader knows this rule, the ending becomes inevitable, which turns the last chapter into dread rather than surprise.
“her pent-up hatred and desire for revenge permeated the air all around”
Arthur Kipps, narrating, Chapter 11, as he pieces together Jennet’s story
Arthur begins to understand the feelings that flooded him at Eel Marsh House. The verb permeated makes Jennet’s feelings a presence that soaks into everything, like damp or fog, so the haunting is emotional before it is physical. Pent-up suggests emotion held in for years and bound to burst out, which is exactly what happens in the final chapter.
“It pierced me through.”
Arthur Kipps, narrating, Chapter 12 (The Woman in Black), at the fair
Four words describe what Arthur feels when the woman looks at him at the fair, and the verb makes her gaze a weapon. The shortness of the sentence after a long description of her malevolence mimics the sudden physical shock, and it comes moments before the accident.
“I had seen the ghost of Jennet Humfrye and she had had her revenge.”
Arthur Kipps, narrating, Chapter 12
The climax of the story is told in one flat, balanced sentence, with no adjectives and no exclamation. The calm is the horror: Arthur states the rule Daily told him and its fulfilment as a finished fact. The doubled had had closes the account, and the sentence gives the ghost her own name rather than the novel’s title, so the woman in black ends the story as a person with a history.
“They asked for my story. I have told it. Enough.”
Arthur Kipps, the last line of the novel, Chapter 12
The final words return to the Christmas Eve frame and close it. Two short sentences and a one-word sentence show a man with no strength left for description. Enough can be read as release, the story finally put down, or as exhaustion and refusal. Note that the novel says They asked, not They have asked, however often it is misquoted.