Leslie Poles Hartley sustains his high critical reputation and faithful readership in twentieth-century British fiction as a minor but respected writer of well-made novels of manners and sensibility notable for their moral and psychological subtlety. Influenced in particular by Henry James and Nathaniel Hawthorne, the novels of L. P. Hartley often combine realism and romance to fresh effect. A sensitive recorder of the high bourgeois social scene and a moralist, Hartley produces work as nuanced as, but perhaps more severe than, the works of E. M. Forster, which Hartley's novels somewhat resemble. Hartley portrays children and adults in emotional crises against a backdrop of changing Britain as it moves from the Victorian and Edwardian sunset to the recent past. His recurrent examination of the fragile relationship between individual interpretation of reality and reality itself is seen to best advantage in his novels with child protagonists, but he achieves...