Books like The Shrimp and the Anemone

Oh, L.P. Hartley, why are you forgotten? This is the second Hartley book I've read (the first was The Go-Between), and if anything this one was even better. Both of the books take a double view, with a main character seeing things from childhood and the reader having access to what the adult world probably actually looks like. This is the same technique that makes The House in Paris so enjoyable, and what I wanted from and did not find in What Maisie Knew, though of course for the latter, it may just be that I find James' prose extremely heavy going, like trying to swim through some kind of boring and viscous liquid. I think perhaps part of the attraction for this book was also that I recognize this inner state, and this theory about child-raising: that correction is more important than praise, and that praise will certainly lead to being spoiled, and that being spoiled is somehow the same as not submitted, as expressing one's own will. Eustance's various terrors seem real and convincing and even, from the point of view of such a childhood, reasonable. I'd like to read the two others in this little series of novels, though I wonder how Hartley will hold up as his characters reach adulthood. Of course, the gap between an inner life and an outer one does not disappear with adulthood, even if it doesn't take the form of nightmares and a complete lack of understanding about capital versus interest. And of course lovely prose is good for all purposes.