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, who comes from a wealthy landed gentry family.

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.

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.

Feeling increasingly uncomfortable about the general atmosphere of deception and risk, Leo tries to end his role as go-between but comes under great psychological pressure, and he is forced to continue.

Ultimately, his unwilling involvement has disastrous consequences when Marian's mother makes him accompany her as she tracks the lovers to their hiding place and discovers them having sex.

Now, looking back on the events through the eyes of a mature adult, he feels it is important to return to Brandham some 50 years later in order to tie up loose ends.

In the end, the elderly Marian persuades Leo, the only other survivor from her past, to act once more as go-between and assure her estranged grandson that there was nothing to be ashamed of in her affair with Ted Burgess.

"[2] A month later Milton Merlin described it as "a superbly composed and an irresistibly haunting novel" characterised by "the author's beautiful and ingenious style, his whimsy, irony and humor, and, most of all, the powerful wallop of a deceptively simple, almost gentle story of a boy lost in a strange world of emotions.

"[8] 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.

When he was about 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.

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" can be traced to one used by Hartley's friend Lord David Cecil in his inaugural lecture as Goldsmith's Professor of English Literature at Oxford in 1949.