The Go-Between L. P. Hartley

Later literary interpretations looked beyond the book's immediately noticeable themes. For Colm Tóibín in his introduction to a 2002 reprint, the book is not really "a drama about class or about England, or a lost world mourned by Hartley; instead it is a drama about Leo's deeply sensuous nature moving blindly, in a world of rich detail and beautiful sentences, toward a destruction that is impelled by his own intensity of feeling and, despite everything, his own innocence."[7] Kevin Gardner cites the narrative technique among other complex treatments of time: "Hartley's haunting tale of lost innocence underscores the modern experience of broken time, a paradox in which humanity is alienated from the past, yet not free from it, a 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."[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. Hartley.[9] Although Leo is 12 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 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.[10] The names are sufficiently close to Maudsley and Brandham to give rise to such speculation. However, Tóibín counsels a cautious approach to the question, quoting Hartley's 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 idea does not prevent it from reflecting his 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" 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.[11][12] Ian McEwan has described his acclaimed novel Atonement (2001) as "an act of homage in some ways" to The Go-Between in an interview, recalling that while reading the novel for the first time at 14 he was "electrified" by "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".[13] 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 ban on Lawrence's work seven years later.[14]