L.p. hartley quotes
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“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there”.
LP Hartley (Wikimedia Commons)
These are the opening lines of The Go Between by LP Hartley, probably some of best known of any novel. Leslie Poles Hartley was born in Cambridgeshire in 1895, the son of a solicitor who also owned a brickfield.
LP Hartley was a pupil at Clifton College, Bristol, for three months from April 1910 where he enjoyed golf and tennis. One day he was walking with the headmaster, Dr John King, who pointed out an elephant in the middle of the road (presumably going to or from Bristol Zoo) which the unobservant Leslie had not even noticed. After a few months in Bristol, Leslie developed a chesty cough and his parents moved him to Harrow. There may have been some romantic or sexual involvement with another boy but no evidence has survived.
During his short time at Clifton College, Hartley did strike up a friendship with another boy who was also gay. Novelist CHB Kitchin was only two months younger and they had much in common, having a shared love of literature and the knowledge of fina
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Call-Up
Novelist Leslie Poles Hartley was born on 30th December 1895 in Whittlesey, to Harry and Mary Elizabeth Hartley. He was an author, most famous for his novel The Go-Between which was published in 1953 and turned into a film in 1971.
Hartley did not live in Whittlesey for long before his family moved to the impressive mansion Fletton Towers in Peterborough. The building had been built in the first few years of Queen Victoria's reign and made a large and comfortable home, and a good location for Leslie and his two sisters Enid and Annie to start their education with a governess.
Sadly, Leslie did not enjoy his childhood at Fletton Tower and stated in a letter to his friend Lord David Cecil that 'I always felt at Fletton like I had done something wrong, particularly in the north wing.' However, he did start his literary career in the house, penning his first short story at the age of 11. He soon escaped to attend boarding schools including Harrow, before attending Baliol College, Oxford, where he studied Modern History.
He began his literary career in his
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L.P. Hartley
Leslie Poles Hartley (1895-1972) was a novelist and short-story writer known primarily for the Eustace and Hilda novels that began with The Shrimp and the Anemone (1944), and forThe Go-Between (1953). He did write both fantasy and science fiction as well, however. His ghost stories, which the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction reckons to include some of the finest of the twentieth century, were published in Night Fears and Other Stories (1924), The Killing Bottle (1932) and other collections, and have been brought together as The Collected Macabre Stories of L.P. Hartley (2001). His only science fiction novel, Facial Justice (1960), imagines what happens when humanity emerges from underground after a nuclear disaster. He satirises the alleged desire of socialism to eradicate individuality.
Hartley was born in Whittlesey in Cambridgeshire, the son of a solicitor and director of a brickworks and of the daughter of a farmer. Until the age of thirteen he was educated at home, which was Fletton Tower, now a few minute’s walk from Peterborough shopping
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