The Harness Room

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’.