Just Feel It: Breaking the Silence in L. P. Hartley’s The Harness Room (1971)

This article aims to investigate the narrative silences in, as well as the critical silence surrounding one of L. P. Hartley's later novels, The Harness Room (1971). It explores the process by which the novel came into being via an analysis of the manuscripts and typescripts preserved at the Rylands Library in Manchester, showing that Hartley did not write it in an alcoholic stupor, as stated by previous scholars. Then, Hartley's prose itself is examined, taking into account the strategies that he used to write his "homosexual novel", as he called it. The clash between the novel's frankness and the ineffable mystery of desire helps to investigate the difficulties of communication between and across gender and class.