L. P. Hartley’s novel The Go-Between, first published in 1953, is a literary coming-of-age story and a critique of the English class system. The narrative is framed around the recollections of its narrator, Leo Colston, who, in his sixties, discovers his diary from the summer of 1900. The diary triggers his memories of a fateful visit to Brandham Hall, a grand country estate in Norfolk. As a naive 12-year-old, Leo becomes the unwitting messenger in a clandestine affair between his friend’s aristocratic older sister, Marian, and a local tenant farmer, Ted Burgess. Set at the close of the Victorian era, the novel explores The Traumatic Loss of Childhood Innocence, The Complications of Transgressing Social Class Boundaries, and Memory and the Unescapable Influence of the Past, using its plot to deconstruct the myth of a pre-war “golden age” of social stability.

The novel is considered Hartley’s masterpiece and draws heavily on his own experiences with class anxiety as a social outsider in Edwardian England. The Go-Between won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction and the Heinemann Foundation Prize upon its publication. The book’s enduring reputation was further cemented by the acclaimed 1971 film adaptation, directed by Joseph Losey from a screenplay by Nobel laureate Harold Pinter, which won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. Hartley, a respected literary critic and novelist, was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 1956 for his contributions to literature.

This guide refers to the 2002 New York Review Books Classics edition.

Content Warning: The source text and guide feature depictions of bullying, sexual content, and death by suicide.

Plot Summary

The novel opens in 1952 as Leo Colston, a man in his early sixties, discovers a diary from 1900 at the bottom of a childhood collar-box. The diary, a Christmas gift from his mother, once represented Leo’s fervent hopes for the coming century, its zodiacal symbols invested with near-mystical significance. Yet the blank pages after July 26th signal a catastrophe he has spent his adult life refusing to confront. At his preparatory school, Southdown Hill, Leo gained a reputation as a magician after two bullies he cursed in the diary fell off the school roof and suffered concussions. This early taste of perceived supernatural power, combined with his fantasies about the zodiac, instilled in him an inflated sense of his own importance that would prove dangerous when tested by the adult world.

In the summer of 1900, 12-year-old Leo, raised frugally by his widowed mother near Salisbury, travels to Brandham Hall in Norfolk to stay with his school friend, Marcus Maudsley. The Maudsleys, a wealthy family, have rented the imposing Georgian estate from the Winlove family, whose ancestral title is Viscount Trimingham. Leo’s early days at Brandham introduce him to the household’s imposing figures: Mrs. Maudsley, whose dark, fixed gaze he finds both fascinating and threatening; her quiet husband, a city financier; and Marcus’s sister, Marian, whose hawklike beauty captivates Leo from the start. Exploring the grounds, Leo discovers a deadly nightshade, a poisonous plant called Atropa belladonna, growing in a derelict outhouse. The enormous, glossy shrub both attracts and repels him.

The weather turns unexpectedly hot, and Leo’s thick winter clothes make him conspicuous. When Mrs. Maudsley asks whether he left his summer clothes at home, Leo lies, then bursts into tears at his own disloyalty. Marian intervenes, taking Leo to Norwich to buy him a completely new outfit. He returns in a light green suit with smoked-pearl buttons, greeted at tea with applause. The new clothes liberate him: He falls in love with the heat and begins to see the Maudsleys and their guests as near-divine inhabitants of his zodiacal fantasies.

A bathing party at the river introduces Leo to Ted Burgess, a tenant farmer at nearby Black Farm, whose powerful physicality fascinates the boy. That evening, Lord Trimingham, the ninth Viscount, arrives at the Hall. Despite Trimingham’s scarred face from a Boer War wound, Leo immediately warms to his gentle manner. Marcus privately tells Leo that his mother wants Marian to marry Trimingham, news Leo finds disagreeable.

When Marcus falls ill with suspected measles, Leo explores alone and reaches Ted’s farm, where he gashes his knee. Ted bandages the wound, then hesitantly asks Leo to carry an unsigned letter to Marian, extracting promises of secrecy. Marian accepts the letter almost hungrily, and the pattern is established. With Leo also carrying messages and notes for other adults, Lord Trimingham begins calling Leo “Mercury,” the messenger of the gods, a nickname that inflates Leo’s sense of cosmic importance. Over the following days, Leo carries messages back and forth, inventing explanations for the correspondence.

One afternoon, Marian gives Leo an unsealed letter. He reads the exposed portion: “Darling, darling, darling, / Same place, same time, this evening…” (131). The discovery that Marian and Ted are lovers devastates him. His worship of Marian as the Virgin of the Zodiac collapses, yet the summer heat softens his moral severity, and he delivers the letter. When Leo tries to stop carrying messages, Ted presses him emotionally, extracting his continued service by promising to explain “spooning” to him.

Saturday brings the annual cricket match between the Hall and the village. Ted bats with spectacular, reckless power, and Leo’s loyalties are painfully divided. When a fielder is injured, Leo substitutes and catches a rising drive off Ted’s bat, winning the match for the Hall. That evening at the village concert, Leo sings “The Minstrel Boy” while Marian accompanies him on piano, and his high, pure voice captivates the audience. Walking home, Marcus reveals that Marian is engaged to marry Lord Trimingham, with the announcement to follow the upcoming ball.

Leo assumes his postman duties are finished, but Marian intercepts him with another letter for Ted. When he protests, she erupts in fury, calling him “a little Shylock” and offering him money. Leo realizes that everything Marian did for him was calculated to keep him available as a messenger. At Ted’s farm, he finds Ted sitting with a gun between his knees, cleaning it. The image lodges in Leo’s mind. He writes a desperate letter to his mother asking to be recalled, but her reply, days later, is a gentle refusal.

Leo resolves to falsify the time of Ted’s next appointment so that Marian arrives at the wrong hour and the lovers miss each other. He visits Ted, who dictates a message for Friday at half past six o’clock. Leo delivers it to Marian but changes the time to six o’clock. When Leo innocently asks why Marian does not simply marry Ted, she wails: “I couldn’t! […] Can’t you see why?” When he asks why she is marrying Hugh, she cries: “Because […] I must. I’ve got to!” (267). She kisses Leo for the first time and calls him a friend. That night, Leo creeps to the outhouse and tears the deadly nightshade from the ground, chanting “delenda est belladonna!” in a desperate attempt to break what he perceives as Ted’s spell on Marian.

Friday, July 27, is Leo’s 13th birthday. Mrs. Maudsley plans tea at five o’clock, with Marian to present her special gift afterward. After lunch, Marian slips Leo a letter for Ted, and Mrs. Maudsley witnesses the exchange. She takes Leo into the garden and questions him with relentless precision about the messages. At five o’clock, the birthday tea proceeds without Marian. A carriage sent to fetch her returns empty: She was never where she claimed to be. Mrs. Maudsley demands that Leo tell her Marian’s whereabouts. She runs through the rain with Leo at her side. They reach the outhouses, and Mrs. Maudsley finds Ted and Marian having sex. She screams repeatedly. Leo remembers very little more, but while still at Brandham Hall, he learns that Ted went home and shot himself.

In the Epilogue, the elderly Leo recounts the aftermath. He had a mental health crisis, and his emotional life atrophied. He became a cataloguer in libraries, devoted to facts rather than feelings. He never married. Decades later, Leo drives to Brandham and discovers in the church that the 10th Viscount, “Hugh Maudsley Winlove,” was born in February 1901, barely seven months after the events of the summer. He infers that Marian married Trimingham while pregnant with Ted’s child. Marcus and Denys were both killed in the First World War. In the village, Leo meets Marian’s grandson Edward, the 11th Viscount, who bears a striking resemblance to Ted Burgess.

Leo visits Marian, now very old, living in a cottage near the Hall. She asks him to perform one final errand: to tell Edward that her love affair with Ted was “a beautiful thing,” that there is “no spell or curse except an unloving heart,” and that Edward must accept his origins and marry. Leo walks out, marveling at Marian’s self-deception yet moved despite himself. As he drives through the lodge gates, the south-west prospect of Brandham Hall, long hidden from his memory, springs into view.