[L. P. Hartley's] best novels are the Eustace and Hilda trilogy, The Boat, and The Go-Between, three of the most significant novels published in our century.

Not even his three most distinguished novels make their claim to permanence obviously. Nowhere does one find the stylistic innovations of Joyce or Gide. Though he learned the lesson of Henry James about a central point of view defined clearly, he allows himself liberties occasionally that suggest the "old fashionedness" of E. M. Forster and the nineteenth century English novelists. His style does not call attention to itself as frequently as that of, say, Virginia Woolf, because it is submerged in substance…. His apparent scope is not a great deal wider than that of Jane Austen or Ivy Compton-Burnett. It is his method to suggest the great world by intensively representing the smaller world most individuals inhabit. With Hartley, substance is the...