When we first met Eustace Cherrington [in The Shrimp and the Anemone] he was a little boy of nine living in an East Anglian seaside town at the beginning of the century bewildered, delicate, priggish, dominated by his elder sister Hilda. In The Sixth Heaven he is an undergraduate at Oxford, still delicate, timid, shadowed by guilt, dominated by Hilda, and vaguely literary in his leanings. The material, then, is precisely that from which the hardened reviewer of fiction automatically shrinks. He has, he believes, read it all before, so many times before; it is the material of nearly every English novelist's first attempt at fiction, whether published or not. The miracle is, Mr. Hartley makes it new and exciting, so exciting that one is not aware, as one reads, of all the other variants of similar L(eslie) P(oles) Hartley 1895–1972 © Jerry Bauermaterial that have preceded...