L.P. Hartleyy

Leslie Poles Hartley was a British writer, known for novels and short stories. His best-known work is The Go-Between (1953), which was made into a 1970 film, directed by Joseph Losey with a star cast, in an adaptation by Harold Pinter. The book's opening sentence, "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there", has become almost proverbial.Hartley was born in Whittlesey, Cambridgeshire, where he lived with his parents, Bessie and Harry and his two sisters, Enid and Annie Norah. He then moved to an estate near Peterborough with his family. He was educated in Cliftonville, Thanet, then briefly at Clifton College, where he first met Clifford Henry Benn Kitchin, and at Harrow School.

The first volume of a trilogy, it was followed by The Sixth Heaven (1946) and Eustace and Hilda (1947), which won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and is also the title by which the whole work is generally known. It was recognized immediately as a major contribution to contemporary English fiction. His other novels include The Boat (1949) and The Go-Between (1953), which was awarded the Heinemann Foundation Prize of the Royal Society of Literature in 1954 and was later made into an internationally successful film, while the film version of The Hireling won the principal award at the 1973 Cannes festival. In 1967 he published The Novelist's Responsibility, a collection of critical essays. His later books include My Sister's Keeper (1970), Mrs Carteret Receives (1971) and The Harness Room (1971). He was awarded the CBE in the New Year's Honours List in 1956.

GIF 1915 he went up to Balliol College, Oxford, to read modern history. There he befriended Aldous Huxley. In 1916 he joined the British Army. He was commissioned as an officer but for health reasons never left the United Kingdom. Invalided out, he returned to Oxford in 1919, where he gathered a number of literary friends, including Lord David Cecil.His work was published in Oxford Poetry in 1920 and 1922. He edited Oxford Outlook, with Gerald Howard and A. B. B. Valentine in 1920, and in 1921 with Basil Murray and M. C. Hollis also. At this time he was introduced by Huxley to Lady Ottoline Morrell. Kitchin, who was at Oxford also, introduced him to the Asquiths; Cynthia Asquith became a lifelong friend. Despite being named after Leslie Stephen, Hartley always belonged to the Asquith milieu, and was rebuffed by the Bloomsbury group.

List of works

Night Fears (1924), short stories

Simonetta Perkins (1925)

The Killing Bottle (1932), short stories

The Shrimp and the Anemone (1944), Eustace and Hilda Trilogy I

The West Window (1945)

The Sixth Heaven (1946), Eustace and Hilda Trilogy II

Eustace and Hilda (1947), Eustace and Hilda Trilogy III

The Travelling Grave and Other Stories (1948), short stories

The Boat (1949)

My Fellow Devils (1951)

The Go-Between (1953)

The White Wand and Other Stories (1954), short stories

A Perfect Woman (1955)

The Hireling (1957)

The Go-Between is a novel by L. P. Hartley published in 1953. The novel begins with the line "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there."

Untill the success of The Go-Between he gained little recognition. He was, however, awarded the 1947 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Eustace and Hilda and in 1956 he was awarded the CBE.