L.P. Hartley Papers

The collection is comprised of papers associated with the life of Leslie Poles Hartley (1895-1972), which have been divided into series based on four subjects; The works of L.P. Hartley, correspondence, personal papers and press cuttings and reviews. The material spans Hartley’s lifetime and beyond, containing works that were written in childhood and works that were published posthumously. The collection is extensive, including multiple accruals, and at times is fragmented, with significant overlap between pieces of the material, especially in the handwritten masters, in which novels and stories often are included in the same item.

The collection provides excellent insight into both the personal and professional life of an extensive novelist and essayist, giving insight into his relationships in the correspondence and personal papers, while the novels and short stories contained in the works and reviews section delineate his literary ability. Several aspects of L.P. Hartley’s literary works are represented, including a number of his novels, his short stories, both within collections and as stand alone, spanning genres of fiction, including horror, drama, thriller and romance. The collection also displays L.P. Hartley’s career as a literary critic, containing several of his reviews. As well as giving some idea of how he has been perceived in the literary world, via the inclusion of reviews and essays written, by others, about his works.

During the Covid 19 pandemic, the records were catalogued as part of an offsite task. The items then underwent a physical arrangement to match the arrangement of the series presented in this collection; the previous arrangement is represented in a box-list and therefore, the records have two references, the reference LPH is for the intellectual arrangement of the series and the ‘original reference’ represents the box-list placement.

Leslie Poles Hartley CBE (1895-1972) was born on 30 December 1895 in Whittlesey, Cambridgeshire to Harry Bark Hartley and Mary Elizabeth Thompson, the second of three children. He attended Harrow School from 1910, before receiving an exhibition to attend Balliol College, Oxford in 1915, where he graduated from in 1921 with a second class honours degree in modern history. He was briefly enlisted in the First World War in 1916, but was invalided out in 1918 without seeing active service.

His essays, short stories and reviews were first published while he was a student at Oxford, in Oxford Poetry and Oxford Outlook. While studying, he befriended Lord David Cecil and Aldous Huxley; the latter introduced him to Lady Ottoline Morrell, and his childhood friend and novelist Clifford Kitchin introduced him to Cynthia Asquith, who would go on to be his literary benefactor for much of his career. These were the aristocratic circles he would spend much of his life in, although given his middle class upbringing he often felt out of place there, a theme explored in his writing.

After university, he began work as a book reviewer for a range of magazines, including The Spectator and The Sketch, and published his first edition of short stories, Night Fears, in 1924, followed by his first novella, Simonetta Perkins, in 1925. Neither of these works were particularly commercially successful however, and it was not until 1944 that he published his first novel, The Shrimp and the Anemone, which was the first in a trilogy of books about its two main characters, Eustace and Hilda, who were loosely based on Hartley and his older sister Enid. By the time of the publication of the third book,Eustace and Hilda, he was a well-known novelist. In 1953, he published perhaps his best known and most successful work, The Go-Between, a novel which won the Heinemann Award and was adapted into a film by Harold Pinter and Joseph Losey in 1963.

Hartley was a strict moralist, and his distaste for vulgarity of modern culture grew as he aged, when he began to give lectures on his ideas. He never married, and his novels My Fellow Devils and The Harness Room explored homosexual relationships. In his younger life, he spent much of his time in Venice, buying a house next to San Sebastiano church, although he was forced to leave in 1939 upon the outbreak of the Second World War. He subsequently lived in Bath, and London in later life, and was made CBE in 1956. He died on 13 December 1972 at the age of 76.

• LPH/1 Works
• LPH/2 Correspondence
• LPH/3 Personal
• LPH/4 Press Cuttings and Reviews

The collection is open to any accredited reader.

The collection includes material which is subject to the Data Protection Act 2018. Under the Act 2018 (DPA), The University of Manchester Library (UML) holds the right to process personal data for archiving and research purposes. In accordance with the DPA, UML has made every attempt to ensure that all personal and sensitive personal data has been processed fairly, lawfully and accurately. Users of the archive are expected to comply with the Data Protection Act 2018, and will be required to sign a form acknowledging that they will abide by the requirements of the Act in any further processing of the material by themselves.

Open parts of this collection, and the catalogue descriptions, may contain personal data about living individuals. Some items in this collection may be closed to public inspection in line with the requirements of the DPA. Restrictions/closures of specific items will be indicated in the catalogue.

The L.P. Hartley Papers consists of multiple accessions, purchased and donated at different times and from a variety of sources. The first accession was acquired by the John Rylands Library in 1981, the manuscripts having been purchased with assistance from a grant from the Arts Council, and the correspondence donated by Norah Hartley and Joan Hall. The second is a collection of letters acquired from Peter Bien, author of a study of Hartley's work entitled L.P. Hartley(London: Chatto and Windus, 1963).

The next tranche of papers was acquired via Maggs Bros. Ltd from the Hartley family in September 1995, followed by items given to the library in January 1996, by John Assheton, executor of the late Norah Hartley, sister of L.P. Hartley, whose estate included all of his literary assets. A donation of letters by Hartley to his long-time friend Joan Hall was made by Hall in 1998.

An additional collection of papers was purchased via Maggs Bros. in 2001, including manuscripts, correspondence, juvenilia and memorabilia, and a series of letters from Hartley and his sister Annie Norah Hartley to fellow novelist Ralph Ricketts, was purchased from Bernard Quaritch Ltd in 2017.

Additional material includes a portrait photograph of Hartley purchased from Charles Cox Rare Books, and small collections of correspondence and autograph letters by Hartley.

The original references are included in this catalogue as it was produced during a MARM student placement in 2021 when access to the collections and the Library was not possible owing to the Covid-19 pandemic. The collection was physically arranged in 2022 to match the arrangement of the series presented in the collection

Photocopies and photographic copies of material in the archive can be supplied for private study purposes only, depending on the condition of the documents.

A number of items within the archive remain within copyright under the terms of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988; it is the responsibility of users to obtain the copyright holder's permission for reproduction of copyright material for purposes other than research or private study.

Prior written permission must be obtained from the Library for publication or reproduction of any material within the archive. Please contact the Head of Special Collections, John Rylands Library, 150 Deansgate, Manchester, M3 3EH.

The collection consists of multiple accessions purchased or donated to the John Rylands Library between 1981 and 2017. Documentation on early accessions is unclear, but the majority of finding aids were at some point amalgamated into one collection list.

These papers had largely been sorted and arranged by former Library staff; in some cases notes of content made by earlier cataloguers and/or the Hartley family were stored with the material they describe, and these have all been retained.

This catalogue brings together all of the L.P. Hartley material held at the John Rylands Library.

A collection of first edition printed works by L.P. Hartley is also held at the John Rylands Library.