Product Description

Maurice Hall is a young man who grows up confident in his privileged status and well aware of his role in society. Modest and generally conformist, he nevertheless finds himself increasingly attracted to his own sex. Through Clive, whom he encounters at Cambridge, and through Alec, the gamekeeper on Clive’s country estate, Maurice gradually experiences a profound emotional and sexual awakening. A tale of passion, bravery and defiance, this intensely personal novel was completed in 1914 but remained unpublished until after Forster’s death in 1970. Compellingly honest and beautifully written, it offers a powerful condemnation of the repressive attitudes of British society, and is at once a moving love story and an intimate tale of one man’s erotic and political self-discovery.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #22536 in Books
• Published on: 2005-07-28
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 272 pages

About the Author
Edward Morgan Forster (1879-1970) wrote six novels - Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), The Longest Journey (1907), A Room with a View (1908), Howards End (1910), A Passage to India (1924). Maurice , written in 1914, was published posthumously in 1971. He also published two volumes of short stories; two collections of essays; a critical work (Aspects of the Novel); The Hill of Devi; two biographies; two books about Alexandria; and the libretto for Britten's opera Billy Budd. David Leavitt is the author of several novels and story collections, most recently The Body of Jonah Boyd (2004). With Mark Mitchell, he edited the Penguin US edition of E.M. Forster's Selected Stories, as well as The New Penguin Book of Gay Short Stories. He lives in Gainesville, Florida, where he is Professor of English at the University of Florida.

Customer Reviews

An Excellent Piece of Literature
"Maurice" by E.M. Forster is one of my favourite novels. It is so simply and beautifully written and tells a story that all readers will able to relate to in one way or another. A tragic reflection of Forster's own life of closeted homosexuality - the novel itself was written in 1914 when homosexuality was still illegal in Britain and remained unpublished until 1970 - the novel tells the story of Maurice Hall, a young man trying to come to terms with his homosexuality in traditional Edwardian England where his "sort" are arrested for such "crimes". However, when he meets Clive, a fellow student at Cambridge, he realises that he is not alone in his predicament after all. As the events of the story unfold, things become deeply sad as Maurice suffers more and more because of a secret that he feels he cannot tell any of his family and friends. The heartwarming ending - which Forster must have hoped for himself as well - is ultimately uplifting and allows the reader to envisage what the future will be like for Maurice themselves.

Foster's Heart
This novel, whilst by no means the greatest of Foster's, does however strike at the heart of the values and ideals his works espoused. While his novels had been written as it were "professionally" (so that he said that of the immensely successful "Howards End", which had preceded "Maurice", that there was no character in it for whom he really cared), "Maurice" is an intensely personal novel. It seems funny to think nowadays, but Forster only fully realised his homosexuality about the age of 26. Initially preferring "Platonic" relationships, he came to value the phyisical aspect more and more, and "Maurice" to some extent documents this.

The plot is fairly simple. Maurice Hall, a highly conventional youth of the pre-World War One era, goes to Cambridge, and there is gradually shaken from his suburban preconceptions. He meets Risley, and through him Clive Durham, and they gradually fall in love. Their relationship is platonic and chaste, rather charmingly. However, Clive (somehow) decided to "go straight", leaving Maurice in an abyss of loneliness and despair. When Clive marries, he goes to visit, and there meets Clive's gamekeeper Alec Scudder, with whom he eventually has a happy, physically-fulfilling relationship.

The main imagery of the novel concerns self-knowledge and self-revelation. Light and darkness are used as appropriate symbols - Maurice seeking the light of (self)knowledge, and is "afraid of the dark". In contrast to "Howards End" the novel is deliberately fragmentary, with short chapters and often some (unexplained) time between them. This suits the subject matter, as Maurice's gradual self-revelation comes to him in fits and starts, not following a smooth trajectory.

Close to Forster's heart are the critique of the middling-classes (Maurice and Clive's mother's are often talking about central heating, i.e. "hot air"); the rejection of Christianity (which foreshadows Maurice's later "corruption); the preference of the countryside as more nourishing and stimulating than "civillisation); Forster's anti-government views (he celebrates "the greenwood" into which Maurice and Alec disappear in the terminal note); and, linked with this, his sexual prefernce for the working-classes, whom he thought freer and more vital than the middle-classes from which he hailed. All of these were particular concerns of Forster's, although he would work these more successfully in varying degrees into "Howards End" and "A Passage To India".

The novel has been criticised for the ending, which many people have found unconvincing. Either the character of Alec is not fully fleshed-out, or the circumstances of their meeting was too unlikey. I think that in the days of particular sexual repression that much had to be read into small hints and clues when people met, exciting little tokens that only those who knew could understand. As for their decision to have a life "underground", well, the novel does also chart Maurice's disillusion with conventional morals and standards, and Forster was excited by the idea of a life with the working-classes. Alec as a character is sketchier than the gamekeeper in "Lady Chatterley's Lover", and his motivations are unclear.

However, Forster aimed in this novel to restore to the human stock homosexuality as something fine and dignified. He undoubtedly acheived tht with this novel, perhaps the first of its kind in English literature.

A miniature masterpiece
In an era of politeness and rigid class, Maurice - our hopelessly clumsy and dim hero - discovers his emerging sexual proclivities unsettle the pleasantries of his daily life, from school to college to commute. Like his investors, his friends and family cry out for safety and Maurice vainly seeks redemption in religion, charity and medical quackery. Betrayed by his first love, Maurice takes a frightening gamble on his second but earns a happiness far beyond his expectations. As a portrait of a turn of the century world where all is order and calm upon the surface, but fatally stifling for the outcast and the "invert", this is flawless in proportion and scope. This short novella easily earns its reputation as a miniature masterpiece.