A book not totally unlike Gosford Park, or that crossed with Cold Comfort Farm. the writing is all very well, gothic or modern as needed.
I was much struck that the old rules of morality, in it, punish a cross-class extramarital affair with madness, amnesia, an immediate suicide, a possibly suspicious early death, and social ostracism still active two generations later; it's hard to see how this could be worse than allowing the misalliance. I suppose that's what makes it an early modern novel: the nineteenth century would have made it clear why the misalliance was worse, and a late modern novel would have allowed it.
So wrote clew in Fiction (20th c.).I think you completely missed the content and focus of the novel and have concentrated on one of the minor issues. This misalliance does not need to be dwelled on, it is clearly due to class conflict of the time, what should be dwelled upon is the boy's journey to manhood which was made increasingly difficult for him. I think you have a reductionist point of view and criticise it foe the time it was written in which is unnecessary.
The narrator wanted to dwell on himself, but the plot events through which he did so undercut his importance. Hartley might have been intentionally showing the changes in morality of his time - and his time was extremely conscious that that was happening - by giving us the perspective of a twerp too naïve to stay out of the way of trouble.
When I rag on G. A. Henty, I'm attacking the standards of another time (or arguing that he doesn't even meet the ones he claims). This is a subtler novel; I think Hartley is illustrating mores changing horses in midstream, and I was struck by that.
kitap özeti
The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.
I particularly like that phrase for using "do" instead of "did", which reminds me in turn of "The past isn't dead; it isn't even past."