The Go-Between

Based on Wikipedia: The Go-Between

The Most Famous Opening Line You've Never Read

"The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there."

You've almost certainly heard this line. It appears in essays, speeches, and countless think pieces about nostalgia and memory. What you might not know is that it opens a 1953 novel called The Go-Between by L. P. Hartley—a book about a thirteen-year-old boy whose summer holiday destroys his capacity for love.

The phrase didn't spring fully formed from Hartley's imagination. His friend Lord David Cecil had used something similar in his 1949 inaugural lecture as Goldsmith's Professor of English Literature at Oxford. But Hartley transformed it into something that has outlived the novel itself, becoming one of those rare literary expressions that escapes its source and enters the common vocabulary of educated English speakers everywhere.

The novel behind this famous line is a devastating psychological portrait disguised as a period drama. Set during the long, hot summer of 1900—the last gasp of the Victorian era—it tells the story of young Leo Colston, a middle-class boy who stumbles into an aristocratic world of country houses, cricket matches, and secrets he's too innocent to understand.

A Boy Among His Betters

Leo arrives at Brandham Hall as an outsider in every sense. His school friend Marcus Maudsley has invited him to spend the summer, and Leo, with his regional accent and social clumsiness, finds himself adrift in a world of wealth and breeding he can barely comprehend.

The Maudsleys are new money—prosperous but not aristocratic. They're renting Brandham Hall from Viscount Trimingham, a genuine nobleman whose family has owned the land for generations. Mrs. Maudsley has plans. She intends her beautiful daughter Marian to marry the Viscount, consolidating the family's precarious social position through the most traditional means available: strategic marriage.

Leo doesn't understand any of this.

What he does understand is that he's being treated with remarkable kindness. The family welcomes him warmly, and Marian in particular shows him affection that makes his heart race. Leo develops a crush on her—the pure, impossible infatuation of a boy on the edge of adolescence who doesn't yet understand what desire actually means.

There's something else Leo doesn't understand about himself. Before arriving at Brandham Hall, he had developed a reputation at school as something of a magician. Some boys had been bullying him, and Leo had devised elaborate "curses" against them—theatrical pronouncements of doom that coincidentally preceded misfortunes befalling his tormentors. The other boys began to believe Leo had genuine powers. More dangerously, Leo half-believed it himself.

The Messages Begin

When Marcus falls ill, Leo is left to entertain himself. That's when the messages start.

Marian asks Leo to deliver notes to Ted Burgess, a tenant farmer on the estate. The notes concern "business," Marian explains. Leo is happy to help. He likes Marian, obviously, and he also likes Ted—a robust, attractive young man who represents everything vital and physical that the refined world of the Hall seems to lack.

Leo becomes their go-between.

The innocence of this arrangement is almost unbearable in retrospect. Leo genuinely doesn't understand what he's facilitating. He doesn't know that Marian and Ted are conducting a passionate affair that would scandalize society and destroy both their futures if discovered. He doesn't understand why they can never marry—why a lady could never wed a farmer, regardless of love. He doesn't grasp that he's being manipulated by two people desperate enough to use a child as their secret postal service.

Hartley handles Leo's naivety with excruciating precision. The boy sees everything and understands nothing. He notices the charged atmosphere when Marian and Ted are mentioned in the same breath. He senses the tension crackling through the summer air. But he can't connect these observations to their obvious cause because he lacks the conceptual framework to do so.

He's like someone who can see individual brushstrokes but cannot perceive the painting.

The Trap Closes

As the summer progresses, Leo begins to suspect that the relationship between Marian and Ted is not about business after all. When Marian becomes engaged to Viscount Trimingham—the advantageous match her mother has orchestrated—Leo naively assumes this will end the correspondence with Ted.

It doesn't.

Leo now finds himself complicit in something he dimly recognizes as wrong. He's helping Marian deceive her fiancé. He's carrying messages for an affair that could ruin everyone involved. He tries to extract himself from the arrangement, but he's a thirteen-year-old boy facing enormous psychological pressure from adults who need him.

The manipulation is subtle but relentless. These aren't villains—Marian and Ted are genuinely in love, trapped by a class system that makes their relationship impossible. But their desperation leads them to use Leo in ways that will leave permanent scars. They don't intend to harm him. They simply don't think about him as a person with his own fragile interior life.

Leo continues carrying messages.

Discovery

The catastrophe arrives with horrible inevitability. Mrs. Maudsley grows suspicious. She forces Leo to lead her to wherever Marian has gone, and Leo—unable to resist adult authority, trapped by his own complicity—takes her to the lovers' hiding place.

They find Marian and Ted in flagrante delicto.

Hartley doesn't describe the scene in detail. He doesn't need to. The impact on Leo is instantaneous and devastating. What he witnesses in that moment—the collision of sexuality, betrayal, and violence—shatters something fundamental in his psyche.

Ted Burgess kills himself shortly afterward. Leo suffers a complete nervous breakdown.

The Foreign Country

The novel opens not with Leo's arrival at Brandham Hall but with his discovery, decades later, of his old diary from 1900. He's now an elderly man, and he has spent his entire adult life running from what happened that summer.

This framing transforms the book from a period drama into something much more disturbing: a study of psychological self-destruction. Leo explains, from the vantage point of what he calls "this hideous century," that he responded to the trauma by forbidding himself to think about it. He shut down his emotions entirely. He closed off his imaginative nature and allowed only facts into his mental life.

The result? He has never been able to form an intimate relationship. The summer of 1900 didn't just end his childhood—it ended his capacity for love.

This is what makes The Go-Between so devastating. It's not really a story about class or the end of the Victorian era or the hypocrisy of English society, though it touches on all these things. It's a story about how a single traumatic experience can hollow out a human being, leaving behind only the shell of a person going through the motions of a life they cannot actually feel.

Return to Brandham

The novel's epilogue sends elderly Leo back to the scene of his destruction. He learns what happened after that terrible summer.

Viscount Trimingham did marry Marian, despite everything. More remarkably, he acknowledged Ted Burgess's child as his own. This act of extraordinary generosity—or perhaps resignation—allowed Marian's son to grow up as the legitimate heir to the estate.

The twentieth century took its toll on everyone. Trimingham died in 1910. Marcus and his elder brother died in the First World War. Marian's son—Ted's biological child—died in the Second World War.

Of all those who gathered at Brandham Hall in that golden summer of 1900, only two survive: Leo and Marian.

Leo finds Marian living in her former nanny's cottage, ancient now but still alive. She has one final task for her old go-between. Her grandson—her only living descendant—has become estranged from her, apparently ashamed of the scandal that preceded his existence. Marian asks Leo to serve as messenger one last time, to tell her grandson that there was nothing shameful in her love for Ted Burgess.

Whether Leo agrees to this final errand, whether it redeems or compounds his original trauma, Hartley leaves somewhat ambiguous. The past may be a foreign country, but we cannot help making return journeys there.

The Art of Retrospection

Literary scholars have made much of Hartley's narrative technique. The novel operates on two levels simultaneously—the innocent perspective of twelve-year-old Leo experiencing events in the moment, and the protective detachment of sixty-five-year-old Leo looking back at what destroyed him.

This doubling of consciousness creates extraordinary effects. We see through young Leo's eyes but understand through old Leo's. We watch the boy stumble toward disaster while knowing, with sick certainty, that disaster is coming. The tension between innocence and knowledge generates an almost unbearable dramatic irony.

Kevin Gardner, a literary critic, has written about how this technique captures "the modern experience of broken time"—a state in which humanity is alienated from the past yet not free from it, controlled by memories that continue to shape the subconscious. Old Leo has spent fifty years trying to escape young Leo's summer, and he has failed utterly. The past is a foreign country, yes, but we carry our passports with us always.

How Much Is True?

Readers and critics have long wondered how much of The Go-Between reflects Hartley's own experience. The novel is set in 1900, and while Leo is twelve in the story, Hartley himself was only five that year—too young for the events depicted. However, he later remembered that summer as "a Golden Age."

More intriguingly, when Hartley was about Leo's age in 1909, he spent a summer with a school friend named Moxley at a place called Bradenham Hall in Norfolk. They played cricket together. The similarity of names—Moxley and Maudsley, Bradenham and Brandham—is too close for coincidence.

But novelist Colm Tóibín urges caution about reading the book as autobiography. He quotes Hartley's own words on the subject from a work called The Novelist's Responsibility: a novelist's world "must, in some degree, be an extension of his own life," but it is "unsafe to assume that a novelist's work is autobiographical in any direct sense."

Perhaps Hartley experienced something like Leo's summer. Perhaps he only imagined it so vividly that it became more real than memory. The distinction may matter less than we think. What's undeniable is the emotional truth of the novel—the precise way it captures how trauma can calcify a person, turning a lively boy into an empty man.

A Controversial Comparison

Some critics have drawn parallels between The Go-Between and D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, written in 1928 but banned from unexpurgated publication in Britain until 1960. Both novels feature affairs between upper-class women and working-class men. Both explore how class barriers make certain loves impossible. Both treat sexuality with a frankness unusual for their times.

Literary scholar Ali Smith has suggested that The Go-Between may have helped prepare British culture for the eventual acceptance of Lawrence's novel. Hartley's book appeared in 1953, seven years before the famous obscenity trial that finally allowed Lady Chatterley to circulate freely. Perhaps, Smith speculates, the success and respectability of The Go-Between made it easier for readers to accept Lawrence's more explicit treatment of similar themes.

The comparison illuminates something important about Hartley's achievement. His novel is not primarily about sex—Leo witnesses the lovers but doesn't understand what he's seeing—yet it captures the devastating power of sexuality to destroy social structures and individual lives. The restraint of Hartley's approach may actually make the impact more powerful. We feel the explosion without seeing the detonation.

Ian McEwan's Debt

The Go-Between's influence extends to contemporary literature. Ian McEwan, one of Britain's most celebrated living novelists, has described his acclaimed 2001 novel Atonement as "an act of homage in some ways" to Hartley's book.

McEwan recalls reading The Go-Between for the first time at fourteen—roughly Leo's age—and being "electrified" by it. What struck him was "the way you can wrap a fictional story around real events and real things and give it a vivid quality it would not otherwise have."

Readers of Atonement will recognize the debt immediately. Both novels feature children whose misunderstanding of adult sexuality leads to catastrophe. Both explore how a single summer can determine the shape of an entire life. Both use the technique of retrospection to create devastating dramatic irony.

McEwan's acknowledgment suggests something about The Go-Between's place in literary history. It's not just a well-crafted period piece but a template for exploring how innocence collides with knowledge, how children are damaged by the secrets adults force them to carry.

Afterlives

The novel has been adapted repeatedly. Harold Pinter wrote the screenplay for a 1971 film directed by Joseph Losey. A television adaptation starring Jim Broadbent aired on the BBC in 2015. There have been radio adaptations, stage versions, and even an opera by South African composer David Earl in 1991.

A musical theatre version opened at the West Yorkshire Playhouse in 2011, eventually transferring to London's Apollo Theatre in 2016 for a twenty-week run. It won the Best Musical Award at the 2012 UK Theatre Awards—remarkable recognition for an adaptation of a literary novel about childhood trauma and class anxiety.

These adaptations speak to the story's enduring power. Each generation finds something relevant in Leo's destruction, something that resonates with contemporary anxieties about innocence, experience, and the prices we pay for the secrets we keep.

The Curse That Worked

There's a bitter irony in Leo's schoolboy reputation as a magician. His "curses" against bullies were nonsense, coincidences interpreted as causation by credulous children. But in a sense, Leo does have a terrible power. His presence at Brandham Hall makes possible the affair between Marian and Ted. Without a go-between, their correspondence would have been impossible, their meetings far more difficult to arrange.

Leo is the agent of everyone's destruction, including his own. His curses against schoolyard enemies were harmless fantasies, but his unwitting facilitation of forbidden love proves genuinely catastrophic. He wanted to be a magician, and in the end, he was—just not the kind of magician he imagined.

The novel's greatness lies partly in this cruel inversion. Leo's childish belief in his own powers is ridiculous, but his actual influence on events is devastating. He cannot control anything that matters, yet he makes everything possible. He's simultaneously powerless and instrumental, a messenger who neither creates nor comprehends the messages he carries.

The Foreign Country We Inhabit

Hartley's opening line has taken on meanings he couldn't have anticipated. "The past is a foreign country" now appears in contexts ranging from historical scholarship to self-help books, often stripped of its original darkness. People use it to suggest that we shouldn't judge the past by contemporary standards, or that history offers a form of tourism, or that memory is unreliable.

But in the novel, the line means something far more disturbing. The past is a foreign country because we become foreigners to ourselves. Young Leo and old Leo are the same person but utterly different people. The boy who arrived at Brandham Hall full of hope and magical thinking bears no relation to the hollow man who discovered his diary fifty years later.

The real foreignness is internal. We cannot return to who we were, cannot understand our former selves except through the distorting lens of everything that happened since. The past is a foreign country because we ourselves are exiles from it, and there is no going back.

This is what makes The Go-Between not merely a fine novel but a genuinely haunting one. It captures something true about the human condition—the way trauma reshapes us, the way a single summer can determine the shape of decades, the way innocence once lost can never be recovered.

Leo Colston spent his life trying to forget what happened at Brandham Hall. He succeeded in forgetting the details but not the damage. The diary brought the memories back, but the damage was already done, had always been done, would always have been done regardless of whether he remembered or forgot.

The past is a foreign country. We do things differently there. And sometimes what we do there follows us home, across all the borders of time and memory, until the day we die.