Hartley, L. P.

Hartley, L. P. ( Leslie Poles Hartley) (1895–1972), novelist, began his literary career as a writer of short stories and as a fiction reviewer; his stories were published as Night Fears (1924) and The Killing Bottle (1932). His first full-length novel, The Shrimp and the Anemone (1944), was followed by The Sixth Heaven (1946) and Eustace and Hilda (1947), the last being the title by which the trilogy is known. Hartley's best-known novel is The Go-Between (1953), narrated in the first person by an elderly man recalling in 1952 the events of the hot summer of 1900, when, staying with a schoolfriend in a Norfolk country house, he innocently carried letters between the friend's sister and the local farmer with whom she was having an affair. As the story progresses, it becomes clear that this distant holiday has marked him for life. Hartley's other novels include A Perfect Woman (1955); The Hireling (1957), which takes up the recurrent theme of dangerous inter-class sexual relationships; The Brickfield (1964); and The Love-adept (1969).