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Hartley, L. P.

the Eustace and Hilda trilogy, [44] 38; The Go-Between, [78] 7

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20230601093013 Flora Watkins on L. P. Hartley, SF 78

A Familiar Country

Flora Watkins on L. P. Hartley, The Go-Between

In a cardboard box I put the essential objects we would need in our rented cottage, until we got the keys to our new house in Norfolk: my infant daughter’s stuffed monkey, some paperwork, Cash’s name tapes for the boys’ new schools and the books we were reading at bedtime – Five on a Treasure Island for the boys, and for me my mother’s tatty copy of The Go-Between, a still of Julie Christie from the film on the cover, which would date it to around 1971.
20141201103316 Alexander Lucie-Smith on L. P. Hartley, the Eustace and Hilda trilogy

Social Climbing is Risky

Alexander Lucie-Smith on L. P. Hartley, the Eustace and Hilda trilogy

The Eustace and Hilda trilogy is a comedy of manners, an illustration of how the middle classes are lost in the upper-class world of great houses and Venetian palazzi, and puzzled by men called Dick who do not share their bourgeois morality. But like all good comedy, it has an underlying seriousness. The world Eustace finds himself in is mysterious to him; for his sister, who is more perspicacious, it is frightening. And how true this still rings, several decades later: some of us find life socially awkward, or are not quite at ease in our own skins sexually – or both.

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