When we first met Eustace Cherrington [in The Shrimp and the Anemone] he was a little boy of nine living in an East Anglian seaside town at the beginning of the century bewildered, delicate, priggish, dominated by his elder sister Hilda. In The Sixth Heaven he is an undergraduate at Oxford, still delicate, timid, shadowed by guilt, dominated by Hilda, and vaguely literary in his leanings. The material, then, is precisely that from which the hardened reviewer of fiction automatically shrinks. He has, he believes, read it all before, so many times before; it is the material of nearly every English novelist's first attempt at fiction, whether published or not. The miracle is, Mr. Hartley makes it new and exciting, so exciting that one is not aware, as one reads, of all the other variants of similar material that have preceded it. His work is unique, reminiscent of no other writer.

In other words, Mr. Hartley is an artist…. The Sixth Heaven is composed, in the Jamesian sense. It is a triumph of art, existing in itself and for its own sake as a beautiful vase or a fine painting does. More ambitious, perhaps more important, certainly more grandiose novels have been published during 1946; but none has given me such keen and delighted aesthetic pleasure as The Sixth Heaven, and aesthetic pleasure is the rarest kind of pleasure one derives from fiction. (pp. 56, 58)