The narrative structure of L. P. Hartley’s The Go-Between develops out of the discovery by Leo Colston, the novel’s protagonist and first-person narrator, of a diary he kept while visiting his schoolmate Marcus Maudsley at Brandham Hall in 1900. The diary, come upon in 1951 or 1952 in a box of mementos preserved by his late mother, prompts Leo to recall his life at Southdown Hill School prior to his visit to the Maudsleys in July and August. The prologue to the novel details these memories; the epilogue shows Leo returning to Norfolk to fill in gaps in his memory of the nineteen days he spent at Brandham Hall and to determine the degree of his personal responsibility for the catastrophe which occurred there on his thirteenth birthday.

Leo’s diary for 1900 is the key to the action of The Go-Between. Encouraged by his use of magic to defeat the school bullies Jenkins and Strode, Leo arrives in Norfolk half convinced of his ability to bend events to his will. He also arrives with a personal cosmography, derived from the figures of the zodiac printed inside the cover of his diary, to which the adults at Brandham Hall appear to conform. Identifying Marcus Maudsley’s older sister Marian as the Virgo figure in the zodiac, Leo allegorizes the conflict between Marian’s fiance, Hugh, Viscount Trimingham, and her lover, Ted Burgess, as a struggle between Sagittarius and Aquarius.

Dubbed Mercury by the adults who use him as messenger, Leo is ambivalent about both men. Trimingham, the aristocratic but impoverished owner of Brandham Hall, is a heroic figure, scarred during military service in South Africa. Burgess, a tenant farmer on the Viscount’s estate, is the father figure Leo has lacked since the death of his own father in 1899, showing him how to fire a rifle and binding his knee after he cuts it while sliding down the farmer’s strawstack. Leo is attracted to both men, and he is unsure as to which he would prefer to win Marian Maudsley. His dilemma is complicated by the fact that at age twelve going on thirteen, he himself feels a half romantic, half sexual attraction to her.

Aware that Marian and Burgess are using him to arrange meetings, Leo senses that his duties as go-between are morally suspect. His uneasiness comes to a head when Marcus Maudsley tells him that Marian’s engagement to Lord Trimingham is about to be announced. Leo thinks that his efforts have betrayed the Viscount, and he resorts to magic to separate Marian and her lover. The spell Leo plans involves uprooting a gigantic Atropa belladonna, a deadly nightshade, but while wrestling with the plant to secure leaf, berry, and root for use in his spell, Leo is knocked to the ground and symbolically defeated. This struggle with the “beautiful lady” sets in motion the train of events which climax on the afternoon of his thirteenth birthday, with Leo’s discovery of Marian and Ted “together on the ground, the Virgin and the Water-carrier, two bodies moving like one.”

Ted Burgess shoots himself; Mrs. Maudsley, Marian’s mother, has a mental breakdown. Leo himself suffers an emotional collapse and, but for discovery of his diary for 1900, would have continued to repress the experience. Having relived the events of his nineteen days at Brandham Hall through the pages of his diary, Leo returns to Norfolk to piece together his recollections. In the village church, he finds memorial tablets for the ninth Viscount Trimingham, who had died in 1910, and for a son born in February, 1901, and killed in battle in France in...