Editing Maurice (novel)

{{Short description|1971 novel by E. M. Forster}}
{{Use British English|date=July 2014}}
{{Use dmy dates|date=August 2021}}
{{Infobox book|<!-- See Wikipedia:WikiProject_Novels or Wikipedia:WikiProject_Books -->
| name = Maurice
| image = Maurice (1971) Forster.jpg
| caption = UK first edition cover
| author = [[E. M. Forster]]
| cover_artist = 
| country = United Kingdom
| language = English
| series = 
| genre = [[Gay novel]]
| publisher = Hodder Arnold
| release_date = January 1971
| media_type = Print
| pages = 256
| isbn = 0-713-15600-7
| preceded_by = 
| followed_by = 
}}

'''''Maurice''''' is a novel by [[E. M. Forster]]. A tale of [[homosexuality|homosexual]] love in early 20th-century England, it follows Maurice Hall from his schooldays through university and beyond. It was written in 1913–1914 and revised in 1932 as well as 1952–1960 (each version differs in the novel's last part).<ref>{{cite book | last=Miracky | first=James J. | authorlink=A. L. Rowse | title=Regenerating the Novel: Gender and Genre in Woolf, Forster, Sinclair and Lawrence | publisher=Routledge | location=New York City | year=2003 | isbn=0-4159-4205-5 | page=55}}</ref><ref>{{cite book | last=Isherwood | first=Christopher | authorlink=Christopher Isherwood | editor=Katherine Bucknell | title=The Sixties: Diaries, Volume Two 1960–1969 | publisher=HarperCollins | location=New York City | year=2010 | isbn=978-0-06-118019-4 | page=631}}</ref> Forster was an admirer of the poet, philosopher, socialist, and early gay rights activist [[Edward Carpenter]] and, following a visit to Carpenter's home at [[Millthorpe, Derbyshire]] in 1913, was inspired to write ''Maurice.'' The cross-class relationship between Carpenter and his working-class partner, [[George Merrill (gay activist)|George Merrill]], presented a real-life model for that of Maurice and Alec Scudder.<ref>Symondson, Kate (25 May 2016) [https://www.bl.uk/20th-century-literature/articles/e-m-forsters-gay-fiction E M Forster's gay fiction ]. The [[British Library]] website. Retrieved 18 July 2020</ref><ref>{{cite book | last=Rowse | first=A. L. | authorlink=A. L. Rowse | title=Homosexuals in History: A Study of Ambivalence in Society, Literature, and the Arts | url=https://archive.org/details/homosexualsinhis00rows | url-access=registration | publisher=Macmillan | location=New York City | year=1977 | isbn=0-88029-011-0 | pages=[https://archive.org/details/homosexualsinhis00rows/page/282 282]–283}}</ref>

Although Forster showed different versions of the novel to a select few of his trusted friends (among them [[Siegfried Sassoon]], [[Lytton Strachey]], [[Edward Carpenter]], [[Christopher Isherwood]], [[Xiao Qian]] and [[Forrest Reid]]) throughout the decades,<ref>{{Cite book|last=Laurence |first=Patricia Ondek |url=https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/835136845|title=Lily Briscoe's Chinese eyes : Bloomsbury, modernism, and China|date=2003|publisher=University of South Carolina Press|isbn=978-1-61117-176-1|location=Columbia|oclc=835136845|page=196}}</ref><ref>{{cite book |last1=Phillips |first1=Richard |last2=Shuttleton |first2=David |last3=Watt |first3=Diane |date=2000 |title=De-Centering Sexualities: Politics and Representations Beyond the Metropolis |url=https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/1020497350 |location= |publisher=Routledge |page=135 |isbn=9780415194662|oclc=1020497350 }}</ref> it was published only posthumously, in 1971. Forster did not seek to publish it during his lifetime, believing it to have been unpublishable during that period owing to public and legal attitudes to same-sex love. A note found on the manuscript read: "Publishable, but worth it?" Forster was determined that his novel should have a happy ending, but also feared that this would make the book liable to prosecution while male homosexuality [[LGBT rights in the United Kingdom#Homosexuality as an offence|remained illegal in the UK]].<ref>Forster 1971, p. 236.</ref>

There has been speculation that Forster's unpublished manuscript may have been seen by [[D. H. Lawrence]] and influenced his 1928 novel ''[[Lady Chatterley's Lover]],'' which also involves a gamekeeper becoming the lover of a member of the upper classes.<ref>King, Dixie (1982) "The Influence of Forster's ''Maurice'' on ''Lady Chatterley's Lover''" ''[[Contemporary Literature (journal)|Contemporary Literature]]'' Vol. 23, No. 1 (Winter, 1982), pp. 65-82</ref>

The novel has been adapted by [[James Ivory]] and [[Kit Hesketh-Harvey]] as the 1987 [[Merchant Ivory Productions]] film ''[[Maurice (1987 film)|Maurice]],'' for the stage, and as a 2007 BBC Radio 4 Classic Serial by Philip Osment.

==Plot summary==
Maurice Hall, age fourteen, discusses sex and women with his prep-school teacher Ben Ducie just before Maurice progresses to his public school. Maurice feels removed from the depiction of marriage with a woman as the goal of life.

After returning home, Maurice learns that George, the servant boy whom Maurice used to play with, had left and becomes heartbroken without knowing why. One night, Maurice dreams of a friend who could sacrifice everything for him and vice versa, a friend who would last his whole life.

Some years later, while studying at [[University of Cambridge|Cambridge]], Maurice befriends a fellow student, Clive Durham. Clive introduces him to [[ancient Greece|ancient Greek]] writings about same-sex love, including Plato's [[Symposium (Plato)|''Symposium'']], and after a short time the two begin a romantic but completely platonic relationship—at the one-sided demand of Clive, who's a [[Hellenistic Greece|Hellenistic]] intellectual—which continues until they have left university.

After visiting Greece, Clive falls ill; on recovery, he ends his relationship with Maurice, professing he is heterosexual and marrying a woman. Maurice is devastated, but he becomes a [[stockbroker]], in his spare time helping to operate a Christian mission's boxing gym for working-class boys in the [[East End]]. Around the same time, Maurice realizes Clive's incompatibility with him and comes to terms with their relationship as one that would never satisfy his physical desires, and one that would end badly for both.

He makes an appointment with a hypnotist, Mr. Lasker Jones, in an attempt to "cure" himself. Lasker Jones refers to his condition as "congenital homosexuality" and claims a 50 per cent success rate in curing this "condition". After the first appointment, it is clear that the hypnotism has failed.

Maurice is invited to stay with the Durhams on their estate after Clive gets married; there works a young under-[[Gamekeepers in the United Kingdom|gamekeeper]], Alec Scudder, who becomes interested in Maurice but whom Maurice was completely—though unconsciously—attracted to at first sight. During his stay, Maurice also realizes he has already stopped having feelings for Clive. One night, a despairing Maurice calls out in the darkness to the "friend" from his childhood dream. Believing that Maurice is calling for him, Alec climbs to his window with a ladder and the two make love. 

After their first night together, Maurice panics over giving his first time to an uneducated lower-class man and fears he will be exposed or blackmailed by Alec. He goes to Lasker Jones one more time but the hypnotism fails even more than the first time. On the way home, Maurice finally accepts himself as a homosexual but resolves to stick to his class.

Meanwhile, wounded by Maurice's refusal to answer his letters and treating him as just a servant for sexual service, Alec resorts to threatening Maurice in order to get his attention. Maurice finally agrees to meet with Alec at the [[British Museum]] in London. They discuss the situation and their respective misunderstandings, but it soon becomes clear that they are in love with each other after both have become tired of hurting each other.

They spend another night together at a hotel. In the morning Alec tells Maurice that he is emigrating to [[Argentina]] with his family. Maurice asks Alec to stay with him and indicates that he is willing to give up his social and financial position, as well as his job to live and work with Alec. Alec tells him that will not work but only ruin them both and leaves. After initial torment, Maurice decides to bid Alec farewell at [[Southampton]]. He is taken aback when Alec does not show up at the port but immediately realizes what that means. 

In a hurry, Maurice makes for the Durhams' estate, where the two lovers were supposed to have met before in a boathouse at the request of Alec in his letters. There, he finds Alec, who assumes Maurice had received the telegram Alec had sent to him. Alec had changed his mind and intends to stay with Maurice, telling him that they "shan't be parted no more".

Maurice visits Clive and outlines what has happened with Alec in order to say goodbye to Clive and to his old life. Clive is left speechless and unable to comprehend. Maurice leaves to be with Alec, and Clive never sees him again.

===Original ending===
In the original manuscripts, Forster wrote an epilogue concerning the post-novel fate of Maurice and Alec that he later discarded because it was unpopular among those to whom he showed it. This epilogue can still be found in the Abinger edition of the novel, which also contains a summary of the differences between various versions of the novel.

The Abinger reprint of the epilogue retains Maurice's original surname of Hill. (Although the surname had been chosen for the character before [[Maurice Hill (geophysicist)|geophysicist Maurice Hill]] was even born, it certainly could not be retained once the latter had become a Fellow of [[King's College, Cambridge]], Forster's own College. It might, of course, have been changed before that time.)

The epilogue contains a meeting between Maurice and his sister Kitty some years later. Alec and Maurice have by now become woodcutters. It dawns upon Kitty why her brother disappeared. This portion of the novel underlines the extreme dislike that Kitty feels for her brother. The epilogue ends with Maurice and Alec in each other's arms at the end of the day and discussing seeing Kitty and resolving that they must move on to avoid detection or a further meeting.

==Reception==
Critical reception in 1971 was at best mixed. [[C. P. Snow]] in ''The [[Financial Times]]'' found the novel "crippled" by its "explicit purpose", with the ending "artistically quite wrong" (a near universal criticism at the time).<ref name="TCH">Reprinted in Gardner, Philip (ed) (1973) ''E.M. Forster: The Critical Heritage'' London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, pp. 433-481. {{ISBN|0 7100 7641 X}}</ref> [[Walter Allen]] in the ''[[Daily Telegraph]]'' characterised it as "a thesis novel, a plea for public recognition of the homosexual", which Forster had "wasted" himself doing, instead of an autobiographical work.<ref name="TCH" /> For Michael Ratcliffe in ''[[The Times]],'' it was "the least poetic, the least witty, the least dense and the most immediately realistic of the six novels".<ref name="TCH" /> [[Philip Toynbee]] in ''[[The Observer]]'' found the novel "deeply embarrassing" and "perfunctory to the point of painful incompetence", prompting him to question "whether there really is such a thing as a specifically homosexual sensibility". Toynbee went on to state that he could "detect nothing particularly homosexual about ''Maurice'' other than it happens to be about homosexuals".<ref name="TCH" />

Somewhat more positively, [[Paddy Kitchen]] in ''[[The Times Educational Supplement]]'' thought that the novel "should be taken on the terms it was conceived and not as some contender to... ''[[Howards End]]''". In delineating "a moral theme", Forster was in Kitchen's view "the ideal person".<ref name="TCH" /> [[V.S. Pritchett]] in ''The [[New Statesman]]'' found the character of Alec "a good deal better drawn" than Mellors in ''Lady Chatterley's Lover'', although found the dull Maurice, shorn of Forster's "intelligence and sensibility", to be hardly believable.<ref name="TCH" /> [[Cyril Connolly]] in ''[[The Sunday Times]]'' found "considerable irony" in the fact that it is Maurice, not Clive, the "sensitive young squire" who "turns out to be the incurable".<ref name="TCH" />

For [[George Steiner]] in ''[[The New Yorker]],'' the modest achievement of ''Maurice'' served to magnify the greatness of ''A Passage to India'':
<blockquote>Subtlest of all is Forster’s solution of the problem of 'physical realization.' In ''Maurice'', this basic difficulty had lamed him. Unlike Gide or Lawrence, he had found no sensuous enactment adequate to his vision of sex. Gesture recedes in a cloying mist. The mysterious outrage in the Marabar caves is a perfect solution. Though, as the rest of the novel will show, 'nothing has happened' in that dark and echoing place, the force of sexual suggestion is uncompromising. As only a true writer can, Forster had found his way to a symbolic action richer, more precise than any single concrete occurrence.<ref name="TCH" /></blockquote>

==Adaptations==
The novel was made into a film ''[[Maurice (1987 film)|Maurice]]'' (1987), directed by [[James Ivory]] and starring [[James Wilby]] as Maurice, [[Hugh Grant]] as Clive, and [[Rupert Graves]] as Alec.

A stage adaptation, written by Roger Parsley and Andy Graham, was produced by SNAP Theatre Company in 1998 and toured the UK, culminating with a brief run at London's [[Bloomsbury Theatre]]. Shameless Theatre Company staged another production in 2010 at the [[Above the Stag Theatre]] in London.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.abovethestag.com/page6.html|title=ATS Theatre: ''Maurice''|accessdate=10 October 2010|archive-url=https://archive.today/20120731155155/http://www.abovethestag.com/page6.html|archive-date=31 July 2012|url-status=dead}}</ref> Above the Stag staged it again in September/October 2018, as part of the theatre's first season in their new premises.<ref>{{cite web|url=https://www.britishtheatreguide.info/reviews/maurice-above-the-stag-16511|title=Review of ''Maurice''|date=12 September 2018 |accessdate=26 July 2019}}</ref> It was directed by James Wilby. The US premiere opened on 24 February 2012 at the [[New Conservatory Theatre Center]] in [[San Francisco]].<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.nctcsf.org/press_room/maurice.htm|title=NCTC – Maurice|accessdate=19 February 2012|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160304063610/http://www.nctcsf.org/press_room/maurice.htm|archive-date=4 March 2016|url-status=dead}}</ref>

A retelling and continuation of the novel by William di Canzio, titled ''[[Alec (novel)|Alec]]'', was published in 2021.<ref name="Chee2021">{{Cite magazine |last=Chee |first=Alexander |date=2021-09-21 |title=The Afterlives of E.M. Forster |magazine=The New Republic |url=https://newrepublic.com/article/163578/em-forster-afterlives-maurice-alec |access-date=2021-10-19 |issn=0028-6583}}</ref>

==See also==
* ''[[Ernesto (novel)|Ernesto]]'', a novel by [[Umberto Saba]] written in 1953 and published posthumously in 1975

==References==
{{Reflist}}

;Sources 
* Forster, E. M. ''Maurice''. London: Edward Arnold, 1971.

==External links==
{{Wikiquote}}
* {{FadedPage|id=20221144|name=Maurice}}
* "[http://emforster.de/hypertext/template.php3?t=maur Maurice plot summary and links]" at [http://emforster.de/ Aspects of E. M. Forster].
* "Transvaluing Immaturity: Reverse Discourses of Male Homosexuality in E.M. Forster's Posthumously Published Fiction", Stephen Da Silva, Spring 1998. {{JSTOR|23124332}}.
* "Heroes and Homosexuals: Education and Empire in E. M. Forster", Quentin Bailey, Autumn 2002. {{doi|10.2307/3176031}}.
* "[https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v21/n02/colm-toibin/roaming-the-greenwood Roaming the Greenwood]", Colm Tóibín, ''London Review of Books'', Vol. 21 No. 2, 21 January 1999.
* [http://www.bl.uk/works/maurice ''Maurice''] at the British Library

{{E. M. Forster}}

[[Category:1910s LGBTQ novels]]
[[Category:1913 British novels]]
[[Category:1970s LGBTQ novels]]
[[Category:1971 British novels]]
[[Category:Bloomsbury Group in LGBTQ history]]
[[Category:Books about conversion therapy]]
[[Category:British LGBTQ novels]]
[[Category:British novels adapted into films]]
[[Category:Novels by E. M. Forster]]
[[Category:Novels published posthumously]]
[[Category:Novels set in the University of Cambridge]]
[[Category:Novels about gay topics]]