In the Springtime of the Year

by Susan Hill

In a rural English village, young Ruth Bryce is struggling to deal with the sudden and accidental death of her husband, Ben. Suddenly alone, Ruth must cope not only with Ben’s death but also with his family who view her with suspicion and hostility. Her sole companion is Ben’s fourteen-year-old brother who understands Ruth’s quiet determination to emerge from this tragedy with her integrity and independence intact.

Genres: Fiction, Novels, Literary Fiction, British Literature, Audiobook, Grief, Book Club

179 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1973

About the author

Susan Hill was born in Scarborough, North Yorkshire in 1942. Her hometown was later referred to in her novel A Change for the Better (1969) and some short stories especially "Cockles and Mussels".

She attended Scarborough Convent School, where she became interested in theatre and literature. Her family left Scarborough in 1958 and moved to Coventry where her father worked in car and aircraft factories. Hill states that she attended a girls’ grammar school, Barr's Hill. Her fellow pupils included Jennifer Page, the first Chief Executive of the Millennium Dome. At Barrs Hill she took A levels in English, French, History and Latin, proceeding to an English degree at King's College London. By this time she had already written her first novel, The Enclosure which was published by Hutchinson in her first year at university. The novel was criticised by The Daily Mail for its sexual content, with the suggestion that writing in this style was unsuitable for a "schoolgirl".

Her next novel Gentleman and Ladies was published in 1968. This was followed in quick succession by A Change for the Better, I'm the King of the Castle, The Albatross and other stories, Strange Meeting, The Bird of Night, A Bit of Singing and Dancing and In the Springtime of Year, all written and published between 1968 and 1974.

In 1975 she married Shakespeare scholar Stanley Wells and they moved to Stratford upon Avon. Their first daughter, Jessica, was born in 1977 and their second daughter, Clemency, was born in 1985. Hill has recently founded her own publishing company, Long Barn Books, which has published one work of fiction per year.

Librarian's Note: There is more than one author by this name.

Reviews

[Phil · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book about thirty years ago, not long after the death of my baby son who, coincidentally, was also named Ben. It was obvious that the author had known grief intimately, and that she, like me, had experienced a profound sorrow as well as deep and total despair.. I am grateful to Susan Hill for writing such a searingly honest book about the journey she made through grief and subsequent healing.
This book was a source of great comfort and strength to me through those difficult times.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

A lovely meditative story of grief and acceptance. Everyone goes through grief when a loved one dies. How we deal with it is different with individuals. Culturally, within the family and as an individual. Hill captures the process based loosely on her own experience beautifully and poignantly.

Ruth is deeply in love with Ben her husband when he is killed by a falling elm in n a forestry accident. The shock, escape from everyone and dealing with life is captured with the changing of the seasons over a year.

[Rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

(3.5) My favorite of the six books I’ve read by Hill. Early one spring, Ruth Bryce’s husband, Ben, dies in a forestry accident. They had been only married a year and now here she is, aged 20 and a widow. Ben’s little brother, 14-year-old Jo, is a faithful visitor, but after the funeral many simply leave Ruth alone. Ben’s death is a “stone cast into still water,” whose ripples spread out beyond his immediate family.

There is little plot as such, but this is a lovely, quiet meditation on grief and solitude amid the rhythms of country life. Ruth vacillates between suicidal despair and epiphanies of exaltation at how all of life is connected. Religious imagery coinciding with Easter describes a cycle of death and renewal. Very late on in the book, as winter comes round again, she has the chance to be of help to another local family that has suffered a loss, and to a member of Ben’s remaining family.

It took me two springs to read this. For those who think of Hill as a writer of crime novels (the Simon Serrailler series) and compact thrillers (The Woman in Black et al.), this will seem very low in action by comparison, but there is something hypnotic about the oddly punctuated prose and the ebb and flow of emotions.

[Lynda · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was the first Susan Hill novel I ever read. When I was a teenager and knew little of grief or loss. I read it again in the late summer of my years and appreciated what a marvellous sensitive depiction it was of the painful nature of the human condition which appears to be all about loss and change

[Lydia Bailey · Rating 4 out of 5]

This not a book & more than a book all at the same time. A very beautiful, heartfelt & lyrical depiction of grief in all its forms but through the eyes of a 20 year old recently widowed young woman. I’m not surprised to see so many reviews saying what comfort readers draw from it when they’re recently bereaved. Beautiful writing.

[Francesca Nield · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ruth instinctively feels the moment of death as her young husband Ben is killed by a falling tree. Overwhelmed by grief, she becomes increasingly isolated with only Ben's young brother visiting her in her remote cottage in the countryside. She neither cares for herself, nor what others think of her as she embarks on her private journey through grief, with its many twists and turns. The novel is written with a deep insight into the many facets of grief, so one immediately understands that the author is writing from personal experience. A lyrical, loving, raw and personal depiction of bereavement shines through Susan Hill's novel. She describes how the central character, Ruth, comes to an understanding of not only her own suffering but the suffering of other characters in the book, and how Ben's loss affects them. She writes about the universal aspects of grief, describing the rector's questioning of his faith and his wife's descent into madness at the loss of their child and, "that they had to make the journey through their own grief, and there was no medicine which could ever help them" p 223. Ruth's emotions are mirrored in the changing of the seasons and in the very essence of Nature, and Susan Hill's descriptions of Nature, in all its guises, and the analogies she draws with the emotions stirred by bereavement are breathtaking, both in their beauty and savagery. Overall, the novel is incredibly uplifting. As a reader I took away the important message that love is stronger than death and that heaven lies at the tips of our own fingers.

[Gaby · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautifully captures grief in all its stages. From desperation to acceptance and everything in between. I think many people who have experienced loss themselves will be able to identify with the story.

I think some will say the book was a bit repetitive, which it definitely was. But I also think most of that was necessary to really capture what it was about, without it having some huge plot twist.

I really liked the many and detailed descriptions of nature and the seasons :) (everyone should know that I’m a sucker for this by now)

“They lay on the sand, and Ruth half closed her eyes, so that the sea and sky danced together, were incandescent, it was a magic world and time went on forever.”

“Easter passed, the spring flowers withered and were swept off the graves and burned, April went out in a flurry of snow, and in May, the rain began again and Ruth discovered no more truth, only went on, not thinking, not daring to ask for anything at all.”

[Liz · Rating 2 out of 5]

A quick read, in part because towards the end I skipped over some of the lyrical paragraphs as they seemed to be a bit repetitive, as was the description of Ruth's grief.
An annoyance was her age: she was 18 when she met him, then she was 19 when this happened; she was 21 having been married 2 years then she had her 20th birthday in widowhood. I do so hate these discrepancies.
she went a bit mad when Ben died after a tree fell on him. His family didn't like her especially the mother and sister. His brother Jo helped her with tasks etc. The rector's daughter died and she helped them for a week, realising that their grief was the same as hers and she snapped out of it. She took in the pregnant sister

[Lynn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Probably one of Susan Hill's finest books.

[Flapper72 · Rating 5 out of 5]

An amazing book. I found this book referred to (recommended) in a Jo Brand book I was reading so thought I'd give it a try. I have never read Susan Hill before and am rather embarrassed that I have never even heard of her. This book is about Ruth, a young woman who lives with her husband Ben. The book starts as Ben dies. The book deals with the world, Ruth's world, other people who knew Ben and the countryside they live in in the time surrounding Ben's death. The emotions experienced and not experienced, how people acted and interacted. It was just so touching, insightful, interesting, brave and an amazing book. I guess that isn't going to make it sound like the amazing book that it is but it's such an interesting area of life to explore. Most books might mention death as an event and don't explore how that affects people that continue to live. Maybe that's a reflection of society generally that we aren't honest about death and dying. This is a wonderful book. My only decision is which Susan Hill book I should read next.

[Andrew McClarnon · Rating 2 out of 5]

Having enjoyed 'Howards End is on the Landing', I'm looking to read more from Susan Hill. I picked this up at the library, not sure whether the subject matter would be engrossing. I can see that it is difficult to write a story around grief (its hard enough to say anything), so this was a nicely paced, well drawn portrait. I was distracted by some aspects of the scenario - why was it necessary to have Ben's family so extreme (given that he wasn't). When was it set (as it is so insular). Only two stars? I suppose it was too slight a read for me to give it more.

[Kirsty · Rating 2 out of 5]

I find Hill's novels a little hit and miss; this particular tome falls somewhere close to the latter. It wasn't awful, but I did find it a touch lacklustre. Whilst it is written well, there are rather a lot of repetitions with regard to the protagonist Ruth's thoughts and feelings, and I felt little sympathy for her with regard to her sudden thrust into widowhood because she just didn't feel realistic. It didn't quite live up to its interesting premise, and a lot of the secondary characters were incredibly shadowy. I think I might just stick to Hill's non-fiction in future.

[Maha · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the saddest books I've ever read. It doesn't lie to you and tells you that things in the end are going to be better. No it rather shows you that the wheel of life is still turning and you must move with it even if you can't or not strong enough.
I liked how the book dealt with death (though a bit too much), and it's not the person who died that is mourned it's who is left behind.

[Sue · Rating 1 out of 5]

Why did I read this? In fact I skimmed it, page after page of the same thing, over and over again. I am now about to cut my throat!!

[Colin · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was reminded of Hardy’s The Woodlanders several times while reading Susan Hill’s short 1974 novel about a young woman trying to come to terms with the visceral grief of the death of her husband in a forestry accident. Although quite different in scale, the interplay between the human story and the natural world is equally powerful and evocative. Ruth’s grief in In the Springtime of the Year is raw, painful and often overwhelming in its all-encompassing grip on her life, and as other reviewers have remarked, can only have been written from personal experience (as Susan Hill has herself acknowledged).

[Helen Felgate · Rating 4 out of 5]

A beautifully written book about death and bereavement and the many forms and stages it takes. Ruth a young and recently married young woman finds herself in the awful position of having to cope with her young husband Ben's death in a tragic accident whilst at work in the forest. She has never been accepted by Ben's family, apart from his younger brother who becomes her main companion, and now they are even more antagonistic towards her when her outward signs of grief do not match theirs.

Perhaps young Joe is depicted as almost too good to be true. How many 14 yr old boys would be so capable and caring and so tuned into Ruth's grief whilst having to manage his own feelings of loss? He is though a younger version of his brother Ben who also challenged his rather staid family and their conventional views.
There is a sense of closure by the end of the book when Ruth takes in Ben's sister who has become pregnant and is now condemned by the family and seen as a failure by her mother who had such high hopes for her daughter. it is ironic she turns to Ruth in her time of need when she has been so unsupportive of her sister in law. It is only when the local clergymen suffers the loss of his own beloved daughter and now questions his own faith and the meaningless platitudes he has offered to others that Ruth sees how she has been herself, and that all she can offer to him is as she has received. Small acts of kindness and utterance of the same platitudes. She has at least experienced the same feelings of loss.
This is such an atmospheric and sensitively written book. The descriptions of the forest lend a haunting quality to it and it is a book that has lingered in my thoughts since reading.. It is a book that I feel I would like to lend to someone who was recently bereaved but is it a too painful experience. Would it offer any sort of comfort or merely deepen the pain?

[Robin · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautifully written story of grief.

[Claire · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this as much as the other 3 I have read in the last year, it seems I can't go wrong with Susan Hill. All the books I have read so far are situated similarly, some small, poor village in rural England where not much happens and we are witness to an inner transformation after some event.
It rambles along quietly, wonderful, poetic writing, perceptions change slowly so that when there is an actual event, no matter that it isn't exactly dramatic, it seems so just by its contrast with the inner world we have been languishing within.

This story follows Ruth, an almost 20 year old woman who has beome a widow, she shuns contact and travels through the stages of grief until finally she achieves some resolution. Brilliant. And many more of her novels still to come, reassuring.

[Deborah Pickstone · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am in two minds about this book. On the one hand, the prose was beautiful and I was very much present in the story - but on the other hand, it was melancholic and depressing - hardly unlikely given the subject matter - and yet it didn't quite ring true. The perspective is from a 21 year old girl whose husband has died after a year of happy marriage - but it felt like a woman of mature years looking back on a longtime happy marriage and so I couldn't quite keep her character straight in my mind.

I characterise this story with the author's 'ghost' stories, which all have the same cold, depressing flavour - unlike the Simon Serrailler series, which I found completely different and very 'alive'. How odd!

[Godine Publisher & Black Sparrow Press · Rating 5 out of 5]

"In the Springtime of the Year... speaks of home-truths, of rituals, of long-established ways of life and of a sense of sharing... (of a woman's) progress through stages of grief. It is less a novel than a portrait of an emotion, and as this it is poignant and convincing."
— The New York Times

[Bernadette Robinson · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book on the whole. However, I did find it very descriptive in parts. I found that I could sympathise with Ruth and her predicament following the death of a loved one and her relationship with his family following it. None of us know how we will cope with bereavement and grief until it happens to us.

[Bobbi Naylor · Rating 3 out of 5]

Although Susan Hill's prose is beautiful, as usual, I felt that the characters in this book, the protagonist in particular, didn't progress in any way much, or if so, did so too little and too slowly for my taste. I certainly recognized the grieving procedure described; in fact, it was a bit too realistic to be comfortable at times. Not a book to read if you're already feeling low.

[Emma · Rating 1 out of 5]

I love Susan Hill and her book. She is one of my favourite authors but this book, which is under 200 ages took me over a month to read! I don't know whether I was just not focused when reading it or it was boring so I'm going to give it a "it's ok" rating x

[Michele · Rating 5 out of 5]

I first read this many years ago and was just dipping into it again today. One of those books I return to again and again with undimmed pleasure.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

Moving account of one woman, virtually isolated, dealing with the loss of her husband and all that follows as a result. Beautifully written (as ever), inspiring and ultimately hopeful.

[Dominicm · Rating 5 out of 5]

its a long time since I read this book but I still remember it as a tale that really gets into the process of grief, I'd read it again too.

[Natalie Richards · Rating 3 out of 5]

A simply elegant story of the grief of a young widow morning the death of her husband. No plot lines, no platitudes just grief, plain and simple but beautifully told.

[ChroniclesofTania · Rating 1 out of 5]

A boring and depressing book about the various stages of grief. Not one of my favourites from this author, but someone else might like it.

[Kris McCracken · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is some wonderful writing here, and Hill has done an excellent job in fashioning the numbness and insularity of a world that has been overtaken by grief. This is a story of a small life, almost timeless in its setting (it could be 1920, it could be 1970) in isolated Yorkshire.

After a brief year of a rich and fulfilling marriage to well-regarded forrester Ben, Ruth - the character within which our central narrative swirls - is suddenly widowed at 21. From here, she is plunged into a deep and dark depression. She finds herself unable to leave home and increasingly self-isolates.

Her only visitor is Ben's 14-year-brother, the wonderful Jo. Jo is a beautifully-realised character, one of those fictional people that you just want the best for. In his own way, Jo cares for Ruth through her darkest moments, all the while he himself stumbling through his own grief.

Hill does such a fantastic job in bringing to life the feeling of deep, deep depression that it is at points profoundly difficult going. Yet in the vividness of the piece, a wonderful exploration of loss, compassion, grief, mourning and the buds of recovery emerge.

There's no melodrama, no sentimentality, just a massive kick in the guts and then a slow, slow, slow process of recovery. There is a power to this book not commonly found in literature, with the cramped and tacitern community in which it is set affording the time and space to let events play out organically.

Hugely recommended.

⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐

[Mike Mason · Rating 5 out of 5]

I first read this book just after it was published in the early 70s and have returned to it three times since. It is truly one of the most extraordinary books I have read.

I have seen different things in it after each read. From the most recent I can see the stillness of life becoming an element in the grieving widow's life. She mourns her husband profoundly and gives into despair, but with the passage of time she learns to accept and to lean into the life as it is right now. Stillness invades her soul - removing any need to fix her situation and work out her future life.

We know that she will move on and that her life will be rich and fulfilled once again - but in the present moment there is found peace for that moment.

One of the final passages refers to a fox who walks down the path in front of her an looks back at her - as it to say: the world and nature knows your suffering and we are one with you - but life moves on - and on he goes down the path. And this is its message, or at least one of them: life will go on - and there is little point in feeling sorry for oneself and giving into despair. God/the universe is watching and caring always.

I will no doubt read this again.