In 1953, this novel—Hartley’s seventh—received the Heinemann Foundation Prize; it is widely regarded as Hartley’s best novel. In 1971, director Joseph Losey chose it for a film adaptation with a screenplay by the noted British dramatist Harold Pinter. The film received the Grand Prize that year at the Cannes Film Festival.

The protagonist and first-person narrator of the story is Leo Colston. Part of the story arises from a diary Leo kept when, at the age of 13, he spent a school vacation at Brandham Hall in Norfolk. Leo presents the rest of the story in his adult voice when he rediscovers the forgotten diary among his late mother’s possessions and decides to revisit Brandham Hall. Reading the diary makes him realize how intensely he has repressed the memory of that summer, and he wishes to determine what degree of moral culpability he must bear for the tragic events that brought his visit to a close.

As an adolescent, much of Leo’s thinking was directed toward understanding the world of adults. He is too innocent to recognize the attraction he feels toward Marian Maudsley, the sister of the school friend he is visiting. Additionally, he has recently lost his father, and the two men pursuing Marian represent two kinds of masculine functioning in the grown-up world. Viscount Trimingham possesses social status, a title, and an estate, but he is scarred from wounds he received in the Boer War. In contrast, the farmer Ted Burgess possesses practical skills and earthy charm; he easily assumes the role of mentor and surrogate father to Leo.

The chief action of the plot revolves around Leo’s role in carrying messages among these three adults. And even as he tries to decide who he would prefer for Marian to choose, he also feels inchoate attraction to her himself. The tragedy that strikes is intertwined with Leo’s witnessing of a kind of primal scene between Ted and Marian—the scene that Leo has repressed, along with its consequences, all these years. As an adult who has these hidden memories wrenched back into consciousness, Leo revisits the scene in person and discovers that Marian is still alive. He is at last able to see the larger picture and also to render her a valuable service, thereby assuaging his own need to compensate for his youthful ignorance.

In structuring a first-person narration told by the same person at two widely separated phases of life, Hartley displays a virtuoso control of voice and tone. He adds a symbolic dimension to the story through Leo’s fascination with magic and the zodiac, and the story’s elements lend themselves to interpretation by means of Freudian criticism. Leo’s diary constitutes a record of an interrupted Bildungsroman, and through the chance rediscovery of it, he recovers the opportunity to complete his growth and move beyond emotional paralysis.

Bibliography
Mulkeen, Anne. Wild Thyme, Winter Lightning: The Symbolic Novels of L. P. Hartley. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1974.
Pritchard, R. E. “L. P. Hartley’s The Go-Between,” Critical Quarterly 22, no. 1 (1980): 45–55.
Radley, Alan. “Psychological Realism in L. P. Hartley’s The Go-Between,” Literature and Psychology 33, no. 2 (1987): 1–10.

Categories: British Literature, Literature, Novel Analysis

Tags: 20th century British literature, academic essay keywords, adolescent perspective, Bildungsroman, Boer War, British novelist, Cannes Film Festival, character study, critical article, film adaptation, first-person narration, Freudian criticism, Harold Pinter screenplay, Heinemann Foundation Prize, Joseph Losey, L. P. Hartley, Leo Colston, literary awards, Literary Criticism, magic and zodiac, Marian Maudsley, mentor figures, moral culpability, narrative voice, Novel Analysis, plot summary, psychological realism, social class conflict, Symbolism, symbolism in literature, The Go-Between, Themes, trauma and memory