Poor Clare

by L.P. Hartley

Poor Clare

Hardcover

Published January 1, 1968

About the author

Leslie Poles Hartley (1895-1972) was born in Whittlesey, Cambridgeshire, and educated at Harrow and Balliol College, Oxford. For more than thirty years from 1923 he was an indefatigable fiction reviewer for periodicals including the Spectator and Saturday Review. His first book, Night Fears (1924) was a collection of short stories; but it was not until the publication of Eustace and Hilda (1947), which won the James Tait Black prize, that Hartley gained widespread recognition as an author. His other novels include The Go-Between (1953), which was adapted into an internationally-successful film starring Julie Christie and Alan Bates, and The Hireling (1957), the film version of which won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival.

Reviews

[Boris · Rating 3 out of 5]

Aunt Clare - the 'Poor Clare' of the title - dies and leaves a valuable collection of paintings (it is rumoured there is a Titian and a Rembrandt there) to her nephew Gilbert, a moderately acclaimed composer (a Sinfonia Disordinata is his masterpiece). To their surprise and bafflement, he gives each of his friends one of the inherited paintings, a Girtin watercolour to his best friend Edward (himself a watercolourist), who is the novel's narrator. Gilbert's unaccountable generosity and unwillingness to explain it raise a suspicion of an ulterior motif (timeo Danaos et dona ferentes, as the epigraph puts it), which breaks up the long-established routine (all the characters are in their mid forties and have been life-long friends) and sets things in motion. What follows is a mild farce of misapprehension and dishonesty (Edward's plotting takes him to Assisi, where he is joined by Myra, Gilbert's muse and - it is rumoured - mistress), a miniature and rarefied (watercolour?) version of an Iris Murdoch novel, as it were.

[Patrick Viale · Rating 4 out of 5]

L. P. Hartley's short novel is a subtle tale of intrigue and betrayal where a the characters move and maneuvre like chess pieces on a board, each trying to control the other, analyzing and rationalizing their actions which, at heart, they know they cannot justify. The story centres on a legacy of artwork left by Aunt Clare, the Poor Clare of the title, to her nephew, Gilbert, and the repercussions on a group of characters. It is a quiet, introspective work, more a quartet than a symphony, but powerful none the less.

[Clare · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very unpleasant narrator, as it turned out.