The Ocean at the End of the Lane Study Guide

Gaiman was born in Portchester, England, the oldest of three children. When he was five, the family moved to Sussex, where they lived in the house that eventually inspired the setting of The Ocean at the End of the Lane. His parents moved to study Scientology, a religious affiliation that caused some issues for Gaiman—one headmaster forced seven-year-old Gaiman to withdraw from school due to his father’s role as a public relations official for the local Scientologist center. Like the narrator, Gaiman was a prolific reader as a child, a habit that followed him into adulthood. He initially pursued a career in journalism, but he also published several short stories, a biography of the band Duran Duran, and a book of quotations as he wrote for magazines. He began writing for comic books in the mid-1980s and was hired as a writer for DC Comics in 1987. There, he wrote the Sandman series, which eventually became some of DC’s best-selling titles and some of Gaiman’s most famous work. Gaiman’s novels, like the Sandman series, have received mountains of praise and a number of awards. In addition to writing novels and children’s picture books, Gaiman has also written for and worked in film and television; he’s appeared as himself in The Simpsons and has written episodes for Doctor Who. He has been married twice—as of 2020, he’s married to the musician Amanda Palmer, whom Ocean is dedicated to—and has four children.

Gaiman has said that though the novel itself isn’t autobiographical, the narrator is a reasonably accurate representation of Gaiman at age seven. Given his youth, the narrator doesn’t mention anything that’s going on in the wider world of the late 1960s, but he does mention the SMASH! comic book series and related superhero television shows, as well as the show Mission: Impossible (which inspired the 1996 film). In describing the transformation of the lane, Gaiman alludes to the urbanization of formerly rural areas and to the 20th century rise of “bedroom communities,” or suburban communities where people live but don’t work. In the novel’s frame story, the adult narrator notes that the lane now sports many houses that all look the same, and that everyone who lives there works in an unnamed city nearby.

Like the Hempstocks who appear in The Ocean at the End of the Lane, there are also Hempstock women in Neil Gaiman’s other books Stardust and in The Graveyard Book. Among Gaiman’s other works, the most similar to Ocean are The Graveyard Book and Coraline—all three feature young characters but tackle complex themes and thus appeal to adults as well. Other books that share this kind of broad appeal include Kate DiCamillo’s works like The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane and The Tale of Desperaux, as well as J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series. Within the novel itself, the narrator mentions C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia series, as well as Lewis Carroll’s children’s novel Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. It’s possible to read Lettie, Ginnie, and Old Mrs. Hempstock as an iteration of the archetype of the maiden, the mother, and the crone, sometimes referred to as the “triple goddess.” This archetype appears famously and contentiously in Robert Graves’s 1948 book-length essay The White Goddess, in which he proposes the existence of a “white goddess of birth, love, and death.” Despite the fact that a number of scholars, historians, and modern feminists take issue with Graves’s beliefs and his scholarship methods, the book has nevertheless influenced authors like Margaret Atwood, who parodies the goddess in Lady Oracle. Another iteration of the trio also appears in Gaiman’s Sandman comic series.