L. P. Hartley

Although the novels of L. P. Hartley have been widely read and praised in his native England, they have never gained the recognition and readership they deserve among American audiences. Perhaps this is partly because they have often been read and reviewed simply as social reporting of the Arnold Bennett school. One of the purposes of this book is to reveal the consciously intricate and meaningful symbolism of these novels through which Hartley, as every true artist must do, allows the reader to see beneath surface reality into the hidden mysterious core of a human being.

Hartley is neither an experimental novelist nor a fully traditional one. Equally dissatisfied with both the nineteenth-century objective novel of society and the subjective, stream-of-consciousness techniques used by many twentieth-century experimentalists, he has found a middle way, a way of retaining both interests—the psychological and the social. He probes the minds of his characters, articulating their subconscious desires by means of daydream, nightmare, and the introduction of fantastic elements, but continues to view them from the outside as members of society in conflict with other human beings. He capitalizes on the dual interest by pitting fantasy against reality, symbol against object, the private self against the social self.

In writing this thorough investigation of Hartley's thought and art, Mr. Bien has made extensive use of his own conversations with the author as well as many unpublished materials. Never narrowing his analysis by strict adherence to any one critical method, he employs biographical, historical, rhetorical, and Freudian techniques to provide a comprehensive study of one of Britain's most interesting contemporary novelists.