L. P. Hartley's generally favorable critical reputation and dedicated readership in twentieth-century British short fiction have been primarily sustained through his Gothic tales, a genre he once described as the most exacting form of literary art....

Leslie Poles Hartley sustains his high critical reputation and faithful readership in twentieth-century British fiction as a minor but respected writer of well-made novels of manners and sensibility notable for their moral and psychological subtlety....

Despite the empathy and perception of this excellent biography, Adrian Wright has not been able to discover the real reasons for L. P. Hartley's deep-seated despair. But it seems doubtful that anyone could ever fully understand the elusive, reticent personality of this remarkable...

THE GO-BETWEEN. By L.P. Hartley. New York Review Books. 326 pp. $14.95. "It's a great mistake not to feel pleased when you have the chance," a rich, disfigured spinster advises a frail, well-mannered boy in The Shrimp and the Anemone, the first...

Basically, Hartley's novels seem variations on the Bildungsroman, the traditional novel of quest for selfhood. In each a more or less sensitive, perhaps slightly neurotic protagonist … undergoes some part of the inward journey from innocence through experience to higher innocence, in a setting documenting one of the crucial moments in recent history: the beginnings of the century and life among the country houses of the Edwardian era; World War I; English society in between-the-wars Venice; Wo...

[L. P. Hartley's] best novels are the Eustace and Hilda trilogy, The Boat, and The Go-Between, three of the most significant novels published in our century. Not even his three most distinguished novels make their claim to permanence obviously. Nowhere does one find the stylistic innovations of Joyce or Gide. Though he learned the lesson of Henry James about a central point of view defined clearly, he allows himself liberties occasionally that suggest the "old fashionedness" of E. M. Fo...

[L. P. Hartley's] experiments in form and technique … are limited, and it is not unfair, I think, to speak of him in these respects as an Edwardian writer, although his main inspiration goes back still farther. His impetus from the beginning has been romantic, and in particular he has always been drawn to the substance as well as the devices of the "Gothic" writers. It is in the light of this, I think, that one can usefully view an important aspect of his work. Hartley published ...