L.P. HARTLEY.

By Peter Bien. University Park. Penna.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1963. 288 pp. $7.50.

The works of the contemporary English novelist L.P. Hartley have been little read in the United States, although Hartley has been praised by both American and English critics and has been widely read in his own country. Peter Bien, in his study of Hartley's works, proves Hartley an important and complex writer who deserves far more attention in this country than he has received.

Mr. Bien believes that Hartley combines tradition and experiment in his fiction; he shows that Hartley has amalgamated the novel of manners with the "stream-of-consciousness" novel in order to "heighten the mystery of existence while still remaining true to ordinary life." The particular and appealing quality of Hartley's novels comes from the interpenetration of (and the tension between) the objective and the subjective, the social and the psychological, the actual and the fantastic. Few contemporary writers have so effectively grafted the techniques of subjectivity (especially the nightmare and the daydream) to the objective narrative technique of the novel of manners. Mr. Bien shows that at his best, Hartley achieves both a sense of objective reality and an intense moral and aesthetic vision.

In his own analysis and criticism, Mr. Bien echoes Hartley's flexibility and catholicity: he uses any critical approach that he feels will clarify Hartley's writing. Mr. Bien studies literary influences and analogues (especially James, Hawthorne, and Emily Bronte); he uses biographical criticism, based on his personal acquaintance with Hartley; he gives detailed psychological (mainly Freudian), sociological, moral, and critical readings of Hartley's major novels, the Eustace and Hilda trilogy, The Boat, and The Go-Between. Such critical flexibility is far more difficult than it seems, but Mr. Bien has mastered it. His study of Hartley's novels achieves an important result of most good criticism: in illuminating Hartley's novels, Mr. Bien has intensified the pleasure of reading them.

Assistant Professor of English