Leslie Poles Hartley was born in Wittlesey, Cambridgeshire, in 1895
and was educated at Harrow and Balliol College, Oxford. During the
First World War he was a junior officer in the British Army, though
he was never on active service. For more than thirty years from
1923 he was an indefatigable fiction reviewer for such periodicals
as the Spectator, the Saturday Review, the Sketch, the Observer and
Time and Tide. He published his first book, a collection of short
stories entitled Night Fears, in 1924. The Shrimp and the Anemone,
his first full-length novel, did not appear until 1944.
The first volume of a trilogy, it was followed by The Sixth Heaven
(1946) and Eustace and Hilda (1947), which won the James Tait Black
Memorial Prize, and is also the title by which the whole work is
generally known. It was recognized immediately as a major
contribution to contemporary English fiction. His other novels
include The Boat (1949) and The Go-Between (1953), which was
awarded the Heinemann Foundation Prize of the Royal Society of
Literature in 1954 and was later made into an internationally
successful film, while the film version of The Hireling won the
principal award at the 1973 Cannes festival. In 1967 he published
The Novelist's Responsibility, a collection of critical essays. His
later books include My Sister's Keeper (1970), Mrs Carteret
Receives (1971) and The Harness Room (1971). He was awarded the CBE
in the New Year's Honours List in 1956.
L. P. Hartley died in 1972. Lord David Cecil described him as 'One
of the most distinguished of modern novelists; and one of the most
original. For the world of his creation is composed of such diverse
elements. On the one hand he is a keen and accurate observer of the
processes of human thought and feeling; he is also a sharp-eyed
chronicler of the social scene. But his picture of both is
transformed by the light of a Gothic imagination that reveals
itself now in a fanciful reverie, now in the mingled dark and gleam
of a mysterious light and a mysterious darkness ... Such is the
vision of life presented in his novels.'
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