Novel: Maurice

Overview
E. M. Forster’s Maurice, written in the 1910s and published posthumously in 1971, follows Maurice Hall from schoolboy confusion to adult self-knowledge in an England where same-sex love is illegal and policed by custom. Against a background of public propriety and private longing, Maurice discovers, loses, and finally claims love, in a narrative that insists on possibility rather than tragedy.

Setting and Context
The novel unfolds from late-Victorian schooldays into Edwardian adulthood, moving from suburban London to Cambridge and then to country estates, city offices, and furtive hotel rooms. Law, church, medicine, and class structure form a lattice of constraint. Forster’s England prizes respectability over honesty, forcing men like Maurice into secrecy, “cures,” or exile. The book’s late publication underscores its challenge to that world: it presents a homosexual protagonist who does not repent, die, or marry a woman, but chooses a life outside the sanctioned order.

Story
Maurice’s earliest instruction about sex is a crude, bewildering lecture from a schoolmaster, which only deepens his sense of difference. At Cambridge, he meets Clive Durham, a thoughtful, aristocratic student who introduces him to classical notions of “Greek” love. Their bond is tender and intimate but deliberately unconsummated, shaped by Clive’s idealism and fear. The relationship gives Maurice his first experience of love and purpose, even as it is hemmed in by the codes of their world.

After a mysterious illness and a crisis of conviction, Clive renounces their relationship, declaring himself heterosexual and turning toward marriage, politics, and the life of his family estate, Penge. Maurice, devastated, tries to conform. He consults Dr. Barry, the family physician, who brusquely denies the existence of his condition, and later seeks hypnosis from Mr. Lasker Jones, who proves sympathetic but cannot change Maurice’s nature. The therapist instead hints at emigration, suggesting that Maurice might find a freer life abroad.

A chance encounter at Penge alters everything. Maurice notices Alec Scudder, the Durhams’ under-gamekeeper, whose directness and vitality cut through Maurice’s cultivated caution. A misread note, a missed meeting at a boathouse, and the shock of Alec climbing through Maurice’s window open into a physical, urgent affair that is at once dangerous and liberating. Their class difference sharpens the risk and the meaning of their connection: the gentleman and the servant meet in secrecy, at night, outside the rules that separate them by birth and income.

Conflict and Choice
Fear of exposure shadows their passion. A letter from Alec, half-threat and half-appeal, brings them to a London hotel, where honesty displaces manipulation. Alec speaks of emigrating to Argentina; Maurice, newly clear about himself, refuses to relinquish what he has found. Attempts to “cure” himself fall away as he confronts the cost of respectability: a loveless life and the betrayal of his desires.

Ending and Significance
Maurice returns to Penge to say farewell to Clive. The once-idealized friend, now a respectable landowner preparing for married life, reels at the revelation that Maurice loves a man and intends to live with him. Maurice and Alec choose each other and vanish into the figurative greenwood, away from careers, inheritance, and the social order that would destroy them. The ending affirms a private, precarious freedom over public acceptance.

Themes
Maurice navigates the knot of sexuality, class, and Englishness. It contrasts cerebral, denatured “Greek” love with embodied desire; exposes medicine, religion, and law as instruments of repression; and imagines love as an ethical claim stronger than convention. By granting its lovers survival and agency, the novel offers a radical counternarrative: happiness is possible, if not within England’s drawing rooms, then beyond their doors.