Hartley’s The Go-Between: Neo-Victorian or New Novel?

Abstract

The Go-Between was published the same year as Alain RobbeGrillet’s Les Gommes: 1953. It might seem that here are two extremes in the standard critical contrast between English conservatism and French experiment in the novel in the 1950s. The years 1953–4 saw the appearance of Amis, Murdoch and Golding working in the mode of fiction which has seemed so conventional by contrast with the new developments in France. Hartley was neither young nor new in 1953. He was fifty-eight and had published what many consider his finest achievement, the trilogy of novels known as Eustace and Hilda, in the 1940s. He is often regarded as a disciple of Henry James, even of Hawthorne: here, it might be thought, is the arch neo-Victorian. But now that the originality of the nouveau roman (no longer so new) can be regarded with a degree of scepticism, and the innovatory character of English fiction recognised, it is interesting to discover, in what is maybe the most widely admired ‘conventional’ novel of the last thirty years, a parallel with the ‘new novel’ in France.