You know that moment you and start a book you’ve been wanting to read but haven’t. Maybe you’ve had trouble finding a copy of it or maybe all the hype around it has turned you off or maybe you’re not quite sure you’ll like the book simply because of who wrote it and when and why. And then you fall head over heels in love.

Yeah. That.

Whenever I read a classic, I prepare myself for the inevitable disappointment. In my experience, too many of the great works of literature only represent some form of change in the history of written words and the society that influenced them rather than being good books. If there is any true deeper meaning on the pages of a classic, it’s usually buried under too many decades or centuries of years passed for me to understand.

That wasn’t the case here. For every layer I discovered there were at least two I missed and there’s nothing I love better than subtle complexity, obvious to see for those who’d only look.

It wasn’t just the story describing and showing what life was like a hundred years ago for a young man, what it was like to fall in love and know it could cost him everything, it was the writing I fell in love with. The way Forster uses words to say exactly what he means to and more. How elegant it is.

Maurice was written on the cusp of The Great War and it tells a story of a world long since lost. It shows a young man growing up to take his place in society as he’s expected, and finding himself fundamentally queer in a time when homosexuality was still a crime in Britain. That law is the reason the manuscript remained unpublished for 57 years until after Forster’s death.

I wasn’t even recommended the book; it was the film I saw raved about. When I have the option, I usually prefer to read the book first and see the film second. Having now both read the book and seen the film, I have to say I prefer Forster’s words over the acting of James Wilby, Hugh Grant, and Rupert Graves. And I liked the casting despite Wilby being nothing like the Maurice I imagined until that last scene with Grant.

You’ll notice that I haven’t actually said anything about the story or the characters and that’s because it’s better if you go in blind without expectations. Skip the introductions, acknowledgements, notes on further reading, skip everything and read E. M. Forster’s own words. Read Maurice.

"Begun 1913
Finished 1914
Dedicated to a Happier Year”

Edward Morgan Forster (1879-1970) wrote Maurice (*) as a relatively young man, aged 34, at a time when old Europe was starting to fall apart. However, it was not published until 1971, a year after his death. Maurice is probably the first literary work of fiction to deal with male homosexuality in such an open, sincere fashion. At the time it was written, men in the UK could still be imprisoned for ‘acts of gross indecency’, as in the Oscar Wilde trial. Publishing this book at that time would have destroyed the deeply admired English novelist. Of course, E. M. Forster’s readers had no idea that the author of very successful novels such as Howards End and A Passage to India loved men. Nevertheless, he let his work be reviewed by his literary friends who knew of his sexuality: He was loosely connected with the ‘Bloomsbury Group’, the literary and artistic circle with such prominent members as Virginia Woolf, Duncan Grant and Lytton Strachey. For the time, the members of the Bloomsbury Group had a very open and unconventional approach to sexuality, and among this group E. M. Forster’s novel could be discussed openly. In public, however, he successfully covered up his sexuality, and I wonder if this might be one of the reasons why I found Forster’s Howards End rather frigid and detached. I second Katherine Mansfield when she complains about Howards End: “E.M. Forster never gets any farther than warming the teapot. He’s a rare fine hand at that. Feel this teapot. Is it not beautifully warm? Yes, but there ain’t going to be no tea " (Introduction p. xxiv).
Well, in Maurice, E. M. Forster pours hot boiling water over spicy tea leaves.

Forster intriguingly describes Maurice Hall’s journey of self-discovery and his sexual awakening. Maurice comes from a conventional middle-class background with a lukewarm mentality. He is very much an average guy (even though Forster describes him as rather good-looking and athletic): not very intellectual, and a bit arrogant. His being sexually different initially comes across as a hindrance to his plans to follow in his deceased father’s footsteps: “Maurice was stepping into the niche that England had prepared for him.” (p.45). Nevertheless, early in the novel Forster gives hints that Maurice has always known he is ‘different’: Maurice remarks early on “I think I shall not marry”, and he is rather baffled when he realises that he is overwhelmed by the fact that his mother’s garden boy George – with whom he used to play in the ‘woodstack’ when he was a boy – gave notice and left. Maurice is, after all, a snob and he would never consider himself a friend of George. Nevertheless, George’s departure unsettles him and he does not really know why he has these special feelings.

Feelings of this kind become clearer when he moves to Cambridge for his studies and meets Clive Durham, with whom he fells in love. Clive’s pedigree is more sophisticated: he descends from landed gentry. Clive is deeply torn about his sexuality, even though he makes the first step in admitting his feelings for Maurice. Foster does not shy away from describing romantic moments between the two and he shows perfectly his skills in evoking beauty:

‘I knew you read the ‘Symposium’ in the vac,’ he said in a low voice.
Maurice felt uneasy.
‘Then you understand – without me saying more –‘
‘How do you mean?’
Durham could not wait. People were all around them, but with eyes that had gone intensely blue he whispered, ‘I love you.’ (p. 48)

Clive considers himself a Hellenist and he celebrates “the love that Socrates bore Phaedo…love passionate but temperate” (p.85). They both set out on a philosophical journey of self-discovery about their sexuality and their place in society. Forster tries to be as open as possible in his depiction of them. We learn that both, especially Clive, have misogynistic tendencies. Alas, it is Forster himself who does not give the reader the opportunity to appreciate a fully rounded female character in his book.

This brings me to Forster’s theory of flat and round characters. In E.M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel, he explains: “The test of a round character is whether it is capable of surprising in a convincing way” (p.81). Maurice in particular passes his creator’s test with flying colours. Even though he might be snobbish, arrogant and misogynistic at the beginning of the narrative, the reader cannot ignore how he develops into a more tolerant and self-aware person, capable of tender feelings. What made this reader root for Maurice was his sincerity towards himself and thus his integrity. Despite all his inner struggles, he allows himself to be who he is; this makes him such an attractive character, not only to the reader but also to others characters in the book. Of course, only we as readers know his innermost thoughts and feelings. Forster offers us a deep insight into these thoughts, where we can learn how sincere and full of integrity Maurice becomes:

“He would not deceive himself so much. He would not – and this was the test – pretend to care about women when the only sex that attracted him was his own. He loved men and always had loved them. He longed to embrace them and mingle his being with theirs. Now that the man who returned his love had been lost, he admitted this.” (p. 51)

Indeed, he loses his first love to conformity. Clive decides to adapt to his family’s requirements and "beautiful conventions" and grows slowly away from Maurice. Ironically, it is on Clive’s journey to Greece that he lets Maurice know by letter that “…I have become normal, I cannot help it” (p.101). Not long after, he marries and settles in at Penge (his late father’s estate) as the squire everybody expected him to become. Forster gives us only a few glimpses into Clive’s inner thoughts and monologues, but they are enough to make the reader understand that Clive lives in denial and self-deception.

“One cannot write those words too often: Maurice’s loneliness: it increased.”(p.124)

In the meantime, Maurice goes through hell. He begins to doubt his own sexuality and increasingly feels lonely. Forster’s description of Maurice’s journey of self-loathing and loneliness gets directly under the reader’s skin. These are powerful passages which help enormously in empathising not only with Maurice, but with thousands of other men in real life who have had to go through a similar hell.

“Yet he was doing a fine thing – proving on how little the soul can exist. Fed neither by Heaven nor by Earth he was going forward, a lamp that would have blown out, were materialism true. He hadn’t a God, he hadn’t a lover – the two usual incentives to virtue.” (p.126)

He eventually seeks advice from a doctor he has befriended, confessing that he is “an unspeakable of the Oscar Wilde sort”. I don’t want to spoil the doctor’s answer, but I can assure you that it did not help Maurice’s self-esteem at all.

It is on the peak of his crisis that he meets the third important character in the book: Alec Scudder, the gamekeeper at Penge, Clive’s estate. Forster likes to let different characters from different social classes bump into each other, as his novel Howards End shows brilliantly. Alec Scudder, the gamekeeper, who everybody in Maurice’s circle simply calls ‘Scudder’, belongs to the ‘class of outdoors-men’. He is a man of nature with natural instincts. The reader cannot really unravel his inner thoughts; Forster leaves us almost in the dark. This is certainly deliberate: Scudder remains the active, pushy, slightly aggressive and sexually attractive, almost mysterious ‘country lad’ for the reader. Today he would probably be categorised as bisexual. He instinctively feels Maurice’s pain and reacts accordingly to his nature. With Alec Scudder, Maurice eventually reaches sexual fulfilment.

“They must live outside class, without relations or money; they must work and stick to each other till death. But England belonged to them. That, besides companionship, was their reward.” (p.212)

Alec Scudder, who in the book represents carnality, the rural and nature (in comparison to Clive, who stands for the intellectual and platonic love) will eventually be the key to Maurice’s ‘liberation’. Together with Maurice, the reader discovers, after several bumps in the road, the route to Maurice and Alec’s happiness. This happy ending to Forster’s novel has much been discussed. I was not entirely convinced, even though it has its roots in real life: namely in the concept of ‘Uranian love’(**) and the relationship between Edward Carpenter and George Merrill, who Forster visited in 1913 and who were an inspiration for this book. I am not sure if it is really a happy ending for Maurice and Alec, but I think it was the best possible end to the book, given the socio-political situation at the time. Forster writes in his Terminal Note: “A happy ending was imperative. I shouldn’t have bothered to write otherwise” (p.220). I, for my part, tend to agree with Forster’s Bloomsbury friend Lytton Strachey, who wrote in a letter to E.M. Forster that “the relationship of the two rested upon curiosity and lust and would only last six weeks” (Terminal Note, p. 222). I can sympathise with Strachey’s train of thought: Maurice and Alec are first and foremost attracted sexually to each other and only later recognise that “what unites them is the need to fight a common enemy” (Introduction, p. xxii).

Despite these minor flaws, Maurice is still an important novel. E. M. Forster wrote it in 1913/14 and revised it in 1960. In his Terminal Note, written in 1960, he recognises a change in the public attitude towards homosexuality: “the change from ignorance and terror to familiarity and contempt” (Terminal Note, p. 224). Still, it took another seven years until the laws criminalizing acts of ‘gross indecency’ by men were abolished in England. Today, the legal situation in Europe has improved significantly; one could only have dreamed of it fifty years ago. This is of course a very positive development. In the meantime, we should be aware that there are still nations where LGBT people are persecuted, incarcerated and even put to death for their sexuality. The human race still has a long way to go.

Let me thus go a step further and suggest that it is not enough to implement legally protected equality, even though this must be an unalienable right. We as a society ask our governments for rights which guarantee equality. But, I ask myself, does society really embrace and integrate diversity in everyday life? Forster writes pointedly: “We had not realized that what the public really loathes in homosexuality is not the thing itself but having to think about it” (Terminal Note p. 224). I can only speak for my part of the world and my generation, but I feel part of a monolithic world where sexual diversity has not yet reached unconscious acceptance and self-evident equality, and where definitions such as ‘gay’ and ‘homo’ are still used (unconsciously?) as an insult. Just look at the advertising industry, mainstream TV or cinema: one rarely finds ‘rainbow families’ or same-sex couples. And of course the male action hero is supposed to be heterosexual. While there has been constant change for the better during the past few years, it is still slow; and I am afraid we still have a long wait before there is a gay James Bond and nobody thinks anything of it.

Until then, books like Maurice have lost none of their relevance.

**********************************************

(*) I highly recommend the Penguin Classics Edition with an introduction and notes by David Leavitt.

(**) “Uranians: The term has its origins in Plato’s Symposium, in which Pausanius argues that men who are inspired by Heavenly Aphrodite (Aphrodite Urania) as opposed to Common Aphrodite (Aphrodite Pandeumia) “are attracted to the male sex…their intention is to form a lasting attachment and partnership for life”. In the 1860s and 1870s, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs promulgated the German Urning, the English version of which was subsequently put into circulation by Edward Carpenter and the art historian John Addington Symonds.” (Notes by David Leavitt, p. 232).

I wanted to like this, I really did. But it just wasn’t my reading day when I picked it up so I lost my interest quickly, which sucks. But I will give this book another chance, I know I will. And I’ll be excited to pick it up again :,)

Forster, you have me smiling like a goddamn fool. // rtc

'Maurice' by E.M. Forster is an intriguing story. It is a coming-of-age tale of a somewhat pretentious and stuffy middle-class young Englishman. Maurice, the main character, has a number of self-revelations, shocking to him, while in an elite public school. He has some more hard and confusing acknowledgements of who he is to work through after he becomes a respectable stockbroker. Mistakes are made. People get hurt, especially Maurice. He falls in love with the wrong guy! Don't we all?

The young lovers are not of the same class, which causes angst. Adding to their problems, Maurice is not as intelligent or facile as his tutor of gay love, the young squire Clive Durham, is. Maurice is provincial and much more bourgeois, reluctant to color outside the lines. He assumes thoughtlessly his superiority over the females in his family, including his mother, too. Maurice is not without thorns and warts. Still, I liked him eventually. He does a brave thing in the end.

While the young man's follies are interesting enough to keep one reading, the book is famous because of what the book's main subject is. In 1912, writing of such a thing with compassion (and passion) was not only taboo, it meant social and professional suicide. The book was not published until 1971 after the author's death because the subject matter was, and unfortunately, still is a matter of much social disgrace and personal destruction of one's life in many circles and in many countries.

Maurice, the eponymous main character, is a homosexual!

Ok, ok, I know, this is 2021. America has legalized gay marriage. Gay characters are openly gay on daytime TV and in family-hour sitcoms. Parents give books about being happy and gay to their children. A story about a young man who wakes up to his sexuality, then reluctantly falls in love with another young man, then loses the first love of his life, then falls more wisely and happily in love again, is not such an unusual or a surprising novel of romance to pick up in a bookstore or from an ebook seller anymore. But there are a number of points of interest in Forster's book.

Forster wrote it in 1912 when being exposed as a homosexual would cause a person to lose everything - career, reputation, family, friends, social respect - and it was also illegal. If one was openly gay - and a few very very wealthy high-born gay aristocrats were indeed socially accepted, reluctantly, if they were discrete enough, even if people did not want to invite them to public parties (for private parties gays were good to go most of the time in many upper-crust or arty circles) or important public functions - and if it was proved in court that a person had had sex with another person of one's own gender, it meant many years in prison. Gay men who were outed often killed themselves in the twentieth century. To write a book of romance between gay lovers was simply not done, especially by a respectable writer who was arguably famous as a literary giant, a winner of prestigious literary awards.

Forster hid this manuscript in a drawer for decades. I think he really really really felt he needed to write this book for himself! He may have lacked the courage to offer it to the public while he was alive, I think very understandably, since it meant years in prison not just social cancellation, for most of his life, but he absolutely wanted it, needed it, published!

The book's plot lies somewhere on the literary spectrum between literary values and the Romance genre. I think perhaps it tips more into being a gay romance novel despite being a very genteel social commentary on religion, authority figures and class, and despite of its being full of sexual euphemisms, than it is a literary read. It definitely has literary bones, though. It shows the social difficulties of loving people when they are of the same gender in quiet realism. As the characters move around between their homes and families, their schools and London, we see a personality spectrum of people, too. But the ending is a bit, um, contrived, and too speedily done. I can't help but think Maurice might have more regrets beyond the last page of this book, no matter how noble he might think he is being. He seemed to me to be in the state of condescending pride that the character Mr. Darcy was in when he first proposed to Liz Bennet in Pride and Prejudice! But who knows? After all, Liz and Darcy worked it out.

Uno dei primi (se non il primo) romanzo sull'omosessualità.
E quanto ha sofferto l'autore... Non poteva pubblicarlo, si vergognava, ha subito le peggiori stangate, umiliazioni, paure, e non ha MAI mollato. Forster era avanti di secoli: avrebbe voluto aprire gli occhi alla gente, far capire loro che l'amore tra uomini non era depravazione, ma un normale sentimento che nobilita l'animo.
Mi commuove, e sono davvero fiera del lavoro di Forster. Pensare che oggi, grazie al cielo, ci sono centinaia di romanzi gay pubblicati con serenità, come è giusto che sia, mentre il povero Forster ha dovuto patire, incassare, implodere, preoccuparsi costantemente di essere giudicato e bistrattato. Ma, alla fine, la tua opera vive in noi, il tuo messaggio è arrivato e ti meriti un grande GRAZIE.

4 stars. Maurice is one of the first classics I’ve truly enjoyed reading and it has everything to do with how gay it is.

After all, is not a real Hell better than a manufactured Heaven?

This book reminded me a lot of Crush by Richard Siken. They both have gay longing, yearning and most importantly, and perfectly captured, a sense of panic.
Physical love means reaction, being panic in essence.
Panic is a synonym for being.

Our main character is an ordinary man plagued by feelings he can't really explain to himself, he longs for something but isn't sure what it is, until his eyes are opened and for the first time in his life he experiences something akin to happiness. But his happiness is abruptly taken away and he finds himself lost once more, longing and afraid.

Maurice was written in 1913 but not published until after E.M. Forster's death in 1971. It feels like a sad story, but it is a happy one at it's core.
The book is dedicated To a Happier Year and, in a way, we do live in that happier year now. Maurice would not have to face the same kind of uncertainties and the same kind of fear nowadays. But our reality is still far from perfect. Maurice might not have been shunned by society but probably still by church and individuals who are still as loud as ever. He might still have considered suicide. In some parts of the world he would still have to be afraid of conversion therapy or even death. This book might have been written over a hundred years ago but, except for some details, it reads like a contemporary. It is an important book. It manages to do what even nowadays is rare: it gives a happy ending to a gay couple. It may be a pioneer in this regard and I love it for that.

A happy ending was imperative. I shouldn't have bothered to write otherwise. I was determined that in fiction anyway two men should fall in love and remain in it for the ever and ever that fiction allows. - E. M. Forster

4 Stars

I’m not well versed in historic stories of the British upper class, but I’m happy to say that despite the fear, despite having to hide, Maurice finds love, grabs on, and refuses to let go.

Though published posthumously, all the stars for having been written at all in a time of blatant unacceptance.

I read this book one afternoon in spring, lying outside on the grass in the sun and it was so incredibly beautiful

By turns pathetic, revolting, overwhelming, and joyful, this reading cannot leave one unscathed. E.M. Forster, a weaver with a hand experienced in narration, is without a doubt - this is the second novel by the author that I have read - one of the great literary masters of the early twentieth century. His storytelling prowess is unparalleled, keeping the reader captivated from start to finish.
The author's majestic language, combined with his sense of the unfinished, the beautiful, the distinguished, and the elegant, could have made "Maurice" an excellent novel. Forster did not stop there: he allowed himself the luxury of a final masterful, dazzling, and enjoyable slap.
A primordial masterpiece on homosexuality, 'Maurice' remains as relevant today as it was more than a hundred years ago. Its exploration of the place of homosexuality in society is a stark reminder of the work that still needs to be done.
'Maurice' is one of those books that reminds us to take the risk of living authentically, especially in the face of societal norms and expectations.

"have you frequented the female society with any pleasure?"

- a legit line from this book