Novelist, short-story writer, and literary critic, L. P. Hartley won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1947 for Eustace and Hilda. Part of a trilogy that offers a penetrating and disturbing psychological study of what Hartley called "sisteritis" in an upper-middle-class family, the three books were described by the London Times as "unique in modern writing...diverting and disturbing. Beneath a surface "almost overcivilized' the reviewer found "a hollow of horror."' One of Hartley's special interests is Henry James, with whom he has been compared.

In The Tragic Comedians, James Hall devotes a chapter to Hartley, who is respected but not popular in Britain, read by few in America, but praised by discerning critics in both countries: "Along with Green and Powell, Hartley has changed the direction of the comic novel, raising even more seriously than they the question of whether it remains comic at all.... His freshness consists at first in simply changing the patterns of the naturalist novel from social insights to emotional ones; yet in doing so he departs from both the older solid way of conceiving character and the more recent fluid way of conceiving consciousness." David Cecil called The Go-Between (1953) "impressive," and wrote: "Hartley is for me the first of living novelists in certain important respects; beauty of style, lyrical quality of feeling and, above all, the power and originality of his imagination, which wonderfully mingles ironic comedy, whimsical fancy and a mysterious Hawthorne-like poetry." The Novelist's Responsibility is a collection of essays and letters.

(Bowker Author Biography)