EUSTACE AND HILDA: A Trilogy

by L.P. Hartley ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 9, 1958

This first simultaneous publication of The Shrimp And The Anemone (which appeared in this country as The West Window Doubleday-1945), The Sixth Heaven (1947) and Eustace and Hilda (which has not been printed in this country) gains immeasurably from its appearance in one volume,-not so much because of the physical interdependence of the three books, and a fourth interlude, but rather in the intensification of the subtle emotional and spiritual conflict suggested in the first book, continued in the next, but only fully meaningful and moving in the third. From the beginning, Eustace is the gentle aesthete, the victim of the possessive, forceful, vigilant Hilda- his older sister, and while children- there is the premonitory sequence at the seaside as he sees the anemone devour the shrimp. As they grow up, it is still Hilda's beauty- and energy- which fetters his more passive, contemplative temperament, so that he encourages her affair with the unreliable charmer, Dick Stavely, which ends in her breakdown and her paralytic invalidism in a wheelchair. Called back from Italy, he faces his obligation toward Hilda, cares for her as his expiation, and goes through with the drastic act which will cure her- but-an in the prescient dream sequences-takes his life..... Lord David Cecil's introduction- ""in any age and by any standard... a masterpiece"" is a fine appreciation of a luminous work of sensitivity and imagination. L.P. Hartley's audience, more firmly established than at the time of the publication of the earlier books, should affirm the interest for this.

Pub Date: June 9, 1958

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: British Book Centre

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1958

Categories: FICTION