Maurice A Novel

E.M. Forster’s reputation as one of the finest writers of the twentieth century is based on an output which is both modest in size and remote in time: his last novel, A Passage to India, was published in 1924. The appearance of a complete but hitherto unpublished novel is therefor a literary event of the greatest importance.

Maurice describes the long and difficult process by a typical product of middle-class suburbia and education realizes that he is a homosexual. It culminates in an ecstatic love affair by which Maurice both fulfills his nature and, in the compelling series of episodes by which the book closes, rejects his entire inherited system of values and conduct. In this combination – of fulfillment and its inevitable concomitant, rejection – lie the author’s reasons and inspiration for writing the novel. Forster wished at once to demonstrate the possibility of love outside normal experience and to expose the rigid structure and morality of a society that did not merely condemn such experience as immoral, but in a more insidious way, regarded it as unnatural.

Although its homosexual content was the reason why Forster decided that the novel, completed in 1914, should remain unpublished until his death, Maurice cannot be defined by its purpose nor by its theme. It was written by a great novelist at the height of his powers – as those who read it surely find evident.