The Go-Between experience. Among other writers commenting on the book's contemporary context, Paul Binding has pointed out that its famous opening phrase, “The past is a foreign country”, had first been used by Hartley’s friend Lord David Cecil in his inaugural lecture as Goldsmith's Professor in 1949. Ali Smith revisited the observed parallel drawn between the treatment of class and sexuality in "The Go-Between" and in "Lady Chatterley's Lover" (1928). D. H. Lawrence’s novel was not allowed unexpurgated circulation in Britain until after "The Go-Between"s appearance, but perhaps, she speculated, Hartley's novel helped prepare the climate for the overturning of the British
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