L. P. Hartley's generally favorable critical reputation and dedicated readership in twentieth-century British short fiction have been primarily sustained through his Gothic tales, a genre he once described as the most exacting form of literary art. According to Peter Bien in L. P. Hartley (1963) the author began writing such stories at the request of Cynthia Asquith, who commissioned macabre tales from Hartley for her annual collections of ghost stories. Hartley's earliest successes in imaginative literature were with short stories, and his interest in this form continued throughout his life.

While the prevailing critical assessment of Hartley's oeuvre holds that he is more successful as a novelist than as a writer of short fiction and that his stories are best seen as studies, sketches, and experiments for larger works, that opinion may be undergoing revision with new appreciation for Hartley's achievement and craft in shorter forms of prose fiction...