From the Heart by Susan Hill review – the dark side of love in the 1950s

Olive Piper is born in 1940 to a mother who had hoped for three sons and “wanted compensation for producing just one child, a girl, by her being, at the very least, a beauty”. But Olive is not a beauty and her mother “could find nothing about her daughter in which to take pride”.

From the Heart follows bright, able Olive during the first two decades of her life, from her mother’s death through university to her first job teaching English at an all-girls’ school, which is also the site of her first true love affair. While Susan Hill may be best known for The Woman in Black and most often associated with ghost stories and detective novels, here she returns to contemporary fiction with a novel that chips beneath the surface of 1950s social respectability to uncover a world as repressive as it is hypocritical. What Hill conveys beautifully is the agony of all that is left unsaid in relationships. In the scenes between Olive and Malcolm, her university boyfriend, and between Olive and her father, there is an economy of language reminiscent of Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach: an awkward, unnerving sense of characters being aware of wanting something but being unable to articulate it. From the Heartis, ultimately, a novel about love: about the dilemmas we face when we are not permitted to love in the way that we wish.