context

• 'A combination of knowing and not-knowing is the novels driving force' -Ali Smith
• 'The facts of life are being taught to Leo, a boy so naïve that at first it's comic, then it hurts the heart' Ali Smith
• the book is very much about identity, about who we are in the personal, the social, the historical and natural senses' Ali Smith
• 'Clothes in the novel demonstrate societal structure so that the revelation, not just of the sexual act, but of the cross-class sexual act is contextualised as all the more unthinkable' Ali Smith
• 'At his public school, harrow, Hartley was the only boy from a family with liberal political sympathies' -Colm Tobin
• 'His homosexuality was known to most of those close to him, but he did not have a lover or companion- Colm Tobin (challenge loneliness through Ted and Leo)
• 'The Go-between has autobiographical origins'- Colm Tobin
• 'Out of place too is the secret love affair between Marian and Ted. it is clear from letters and articles that Hartley disapproved of their affair and expected the reader to do so as well' Colm Tobin
• 'The reader cannot resist wanting Ted and Marian to prevail because Leo cannot resist either of them' Colm Tobin
• 'It became kind of a golden age' LP Hartley
• 'Since the first world war the changes in the structure of society.. have been so violent and so rapid' LP Hartley
• 'Leo was a natural go-between, it was his function in life' LP Hartley
• 'fifty years later he was still the same person' LP Hartley
• the Boer war: war between the British and the Boers in South Africa, this forebodes the disruption to class and shows underestimation of middle class strength.
• Hartley better known for writing gothic and supernatural short stories
• written 1953 but set 1900
• 1900 see's enjoyment of the new century and excitement yet came with destruction of WW1-2
• metaphorical comparison of the villagers as Boers, undermining them. resulted in British victory however costly war for Britain and more British troops killed than Boer, recruited black Africans. End of British empire= symbols end of class disparity?
• cricket typically associated with high class
• Bildungsroman genre: psychological growth from childhood to adulthood. Link to Catcher in the rye as Caulfield tries to navigate adolescence and find truth in adult world
• Freud's psychoanalytic theory said all humans motivated by sexual impulses
• The figure of the zodiac allowed Leo to construct his own ideas about morality and supernatural. represents Leo's attempt to understand the world as orderly and magical with shattering disappointment as they discover it's neither
• Victorian norms of women as subservient however Marian subverts this