The story revolves around Maurice Hall, a young, affluent, and conventional man who appears to have it all: a promising career, a loving family, and a secure social status. However, beneath this façade, Maurice struggles with his own desires and identity. During his university years, he begins a secret romantic relationship with Clive Durham, a fellow student with whom he shares a deep emotional connection.
The contrasting paths of Clive and Alec are crucial to the novel. Their different relationships with Maurice—Clive representing a more "chaste" and intellectual, ultimately apologetic, form of male love, while Alec embodies a physically and emotionally unashamed bond that overrides class boundaries. Forster uses these two characters to explore the different ways society and its prejudices shape, and often destroy, the lives of gay men. maurice by em forster
The story of Maurice has continued to inspire new works. The story revolves around Maurice Hall, a young,
Forster wrote Maurice in the aftermath of a transformative trip to India and a visit to Edward Carpenter, an advocate for gay rights who lived in a same-sex partnership. The novel was written in an era where homosexuality was not only criminalized but deeply stigmatized. The contrasting paths of Clive and Alec are
However, despite its hopeful interior, the world outside was profoundly hostile. The shadow of Oscar Wilde’s imprisonment for "gross indecency" in 1895, a mere two decades earlier, hung over Forster’s England. Homosexuality was not only socially taboo but a criminal act. Forster knew that publishing Maurice would invite public outrage, likely ruin his reputation, and could even lead to his own prosecution. A note found on the manuscript—"Publishable, but worth it?"—speaks to the agonising calculation he had to make. For the next five decades, Forster showed the manuscript to only a small, trusted circle of friends, which included writers like Siegfried Sassoon, Lytton Strachey, and Christopher Isherwood, but he refused to publish it.
Forster was influenced by the medieval legend of the "Greenwood"—a forest outside the bounds of society where outlaws live freely. In Maurice , the natural world (the woods, the boat house) represents freedom and truth, while the city, the university, and the country estate represent repression and lies. The novel ends with Maurice and Alec "going into the Greenwood," becoming social outlaws to preserve their love.