Leslie Poles Hartley is a nation-famous British writer famous for his novels ("Eustace and Hilda" (1947), "The Go-Between", "The Hireling" (1957) and short stories. He revived the genre of thriller in English literature, which had been forgotten for a long time, the main literary stream of the XIX century being the realism.
Though Hartley’s works have a lot in common with realism, he created his own genre following the English tradition of Gothic novel and E.A.Poe’s horror stories. Henry James was a master he always revered; and, like James, he was frequently possessed bys ideas of guilt and solitude and evil. As a contemporary reviewer remarked, "not only does he portray the exterior of social life with a novelist's sharp eye for detail, but he also explores the underworld of fears and fantasies through which we wander in our ugliest dreams."
L.P.Hartley is a keen and accurate observer of the process of human thought and feeling; he is also a sharp-eyed chronicler of the social scene. But his picture of both is transformed by the light of Gothic imagination.
In the story titled “W.S” the author dwells upon the problems of writing and the author’s responsibility not just to his readers, but to his characters as well. The message of the text is that the literature should be created by talented writers only.
As for the plot structure of the text, we should mention that there’s no exposition as such, the expositional elements are scattered about the story. As it proceeds we learn the answers to some of the typical questions: “who” – Walter Streeter and the anonymous correspondent, “when” – in November (“he threw the postcards into November fire”) “why” - is a mystery up to the end, “where” – “in a large West Country town about ninety miles from