The Go-Between past that continues to exist in and to control the subconscious … This doubling of consciousness and of narrative voice—the innocent twelve-year-old's emerging from beneath the self-protective sixty-five-year-old's—is one of Hartley's most effective techniques.” Another preoccupation in Tóibín's introduction was how far the story of “The Go-Between” is based on fact, in the wake of Adrian Wright’s biographical study, "Foreign Country: The Life of L. P. Hartley". Although Leo is twelve at the time of the novel – the long, hot summer of 1900 – the five-year-old Hartley remembered that time afterwards as "a Golden Age". When he was about
The Go-Between Leo's age in 1909, Hartley spent a summer with a school friend called Moxley at Bradenham Hall in Norfolk and took part in a cricket match. The names are sufficiently close to Maudsley and Brandham to give rise to such speculation. But Tóibín counsels a cautious approach to the question, quoting Hartley's own study of fiction-writing, "The Novelist's Responsibility". The novelist's world, he wrote, "must, in some degree, be an extension of his own life." And, while it is “unsafe to assume that a novelist's work is autobiographical in any direct sense,” this does not prevent it from reflecting his