
The Harness Room (1971)
L. P. Hartley
With a new introduction by Gregory Woods
Book Description
Colonel Macready thinks his bookish seventeen-year-old son Fergus is too soft, so he enlists the help of his manly chauffeur, Fred Carrington, to help whip the boy into shape. But the sweaty afternoons in the harness room above the garage take a turn the Colonel hadn’t foreseen when Fergus and Fred’s boxing sessions lead first to friendship, and then to something more . . .
L. P. Hartley (1895-1972) is best known for his classics The Go-Between and Eustace and Hilda, as well as his supernatural stories, but The Harness Room (1971), the author’s only explicitly gay-themed novel, reveals another side to this important 20th-century English writer. This first-ever reprint of Hartley’s scarce novel features a new introduction by Gregory Woods, who writes that The Harness Room ‘can be seen as representing a pivotal moment, not only in the career of this significant gay author, but also in the development of gay fiction itself’.
L. P. Hartley
With a new introduction by Gregory Woods
Book Description
Colonel Macready thinks his bookish seventeen-year-old son Fergus is too soft, so he enlists the help of his manly chauffeur, Fred Carrington, to help whip the boy into shape. But the sweaty afternoons in the harness room above the garage take a turn the Colonel hadn’t foreseen when Fergus and Fred’s boxing sessions lead first to friendship, and then to something more . . .
L. P. Hartley (1895-1972) is best known for his classics The Go-Between and Eustace and Hilda, as well as his supernatural stories, but The Harness Room (1971), the author’s only explicitly gay-themed novel, reveals another side to this important 20th-century English writer. This first-ever reprint of Hartley’s scarce novel features a new introduction by Gregory Woods, who writes that The Harness Room ‘can be seen as representing a pivotal moment, not only in the career of this significant gay author, but also in the development of gay fiction itself’.
BOOK DETAILS
ISBN: 1954321627 ISBN-13: 978-1954321625 $24.99 US, pp. Case Laminate Hardcover Published 2022 BOOK DETAILS ISBN: 1954321619 ISBN-13: 978-1954321618 $15.99 US, pp. Trade paper Published 2022 |
|
also available through online retailers
MORE TITLES BY THIS AUTHOR
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Leslie Poles Hartley was born in Whittlesey, Cambridgeshire in 1895, the son of a solicitor. He was the author of over twenty volumes of fiction, the best known of which are The Go-Between (1953), which is regarded as a modern classic and was adapted for a 1971 film directed by Joseph Losey, and the Eustace and Hilda trilogy (1944-47), the final volume of which won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Hartley was also an accomplished author of supernatural and macabre tales, some of which appeared in his collections Night Fears (1924) and The Killing Bottle (1932) and were compiled in the Arkham House edition of The Travelling Grave and Other Stories (1948). Hartley was awarded a CBE in 1956 and died in 1972.