The Go-Between

The Go-Between is a novel by L. P. Hartley published in 1953. His best-known work, it has been adapted several times for stage and screen. The book gives a critical view of society at the end of the Victorian era through the eyes of a naïve schoolboy outsider. Synopsis In the book's prologue, Leo Colston chances upon a diary from 1900, the year of his thirteenth birthday, and gradually pieces together a memory that he has suppressed. Under its influence, and from the viewpoint of what he has become by the midpoint of "this hideous century", Leo relives the events of what had once seemed to him its hopeful beginning. The importance of his boarding school's social rules is another theme running through the book and complicates Leo's interaction with the adult world. "Curses" of his devising had routed boys who were bullying Leo at school and had given him the reputation of a magician, something that he came to half-believe himself. As a result, he is invited as a guest to spend the summer at Brandham Hall, the country home of his school friend Marcus Maudsley. There the socially clumsy Leo, with his regional accent, is a middle-class boy among the wealthy upper class. Although he does not fit into this society, his hosts do their best to make him feel welcome, treating him with kindness and indulgence, especially their daughter Marian. When Marcus falls ill, Leo is left largely to his own devices and becomes a secret "postman" for Marian and nearby tenant farmer Ted Burgess, with whom she is having a clandestine relationship. Leo is happy to help Marian because he has a crush on her and likes Ted. Besides, Leo is initially ignorant of the significance or content of the messages that he is asked to carry between them, and the well-meaning, innocent boy is easily manipulated by the lovers. Although Marian and Ted are fully aware of the social taboo that must make their relationship a matter of the utmost secrecy, Leo is too naïve to understand why they never can marry. The situation is complicated by the fact that Marian is about to become engaged to Hugh, Viscount Trimingham, the descendant of the area's nobility who formerly lived in Brandham Hall. As he begins to comprehend that the relationship between Marian and Ted is not to do with "business" as they have claimed, Leo naively believes that Marian's engagement ought to bring the correspondence between her and Ted to an end.