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Maurice: A Novel
by E. M. Forster
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Paperback
Publisher: W.W. Norton & Co.
ISBN13: 9780393310320
Condition: NEW
Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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Written during 1913 and 1914, Maurice deals with the then unmentionable subject of homosexuality. More unusual, it concerns a relationship that ends happily.
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| Learning acceptance of oneself |
| Customer Rating: 5 out of 5 |
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E.M. Forster appears to have been ahead of his time with "Maurice". Indeed, having been written around 1914 but not published until 1971 - after his death - the world wasn't ready for it originally. Thankfully, much changed after that. Although the setting is clearly dated to the period it was written, the characters, ideas, and feelings represented are timeless. It very effectively conveys struggling with one's own identity, learning to love one's self and searching for another to love.
Maurice is a young man who grows up in England before World War I realizing he is different from other men. He discovers he is attracted to other men and - like many others in his circumstances - goes through a rough time reconciling himself with this fact. While in school at Cambridge, he meets Clive whom he quickly finds out is of a similar nature. The two men have a short-lived romance that's almost entirely platonic, as dictated by Clive. Left forlorn, Maurice continues to struggle with his own nature and even consults physicians about what can be done to make him attracted to women, a condition which Maurice still associates with normalcy. Eventually he meets Alec, a gay man who is in some ways more comfortable with himself but at the same time seems more willing to deny his nature. The two men challenge one another's thinking and ultimately have a huge effect on each other's futures.
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| Great Book |
| Customer Rating: 4 out of 5 |
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This book is even better than the movie, I wish I would have read it beforehand. Highly recommended, if you haven't already done so, it's a must read for all !
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| An Excellent Piece of Literature |
| Customer Rating: 5 out of 5 |
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"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 deely 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.
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| "England has always been disinclined to accept human nature" |
| Customer Rating: 5 out of 5 |
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At first blush, "Maurice" seems unlike any of Forster's other novels. An unapologetic tale of love between Maurice Hall and Clive Durham, two Cambridge students during the years preceding World War I, the book is still a sensation; it's no wonder that Forster chose not to publish it--it would have ended his career. Yet this story, too, explores the preoccupations apparent in all of Forster's fiction: the hypocrisy of British traditions and, especially, the absurdity of British class structure.
"England has always been disinclined to accept human nature," says a mesmerist to Maurice when he is seeking a cure for his "condition." In this scene, the doctor is referring, of course, to sexuality, but considered in the light of all six of his novels, Forster judges English attitudes toward the human condition as a whole. Once Maurice and Clive fall in love, "no tradition overawed the boys. No convention settled what was poetic, what absurd." But it is, in part, this knowledge of being outside the law (or, as Maurice admits, "outlaws") that ultimately rends the couple in half.
The last section of the book brings together all these themes. Maurice's unanticipated and tense liaison with Scudder--a servant, no less--is seemingly impossible not only because they are both the same sex but also because they hail from different classes. To society, the sexual element is intolerable, but to Maurice the class difference makes such a relationship even more inconceivable--"if the will can overleap class, civilization as we have made it will go to pieces."
To Forster, however, both taboos stem from the same tyrannical tradition; he had similarly depicted the futility of mixed-class relationships in his previous novel, "Howards End," with the illicit relationship between the blueblood Henry Wilcox and the lowborn Jacky Best. But here he brings to the story the possibility of hope. Indeed, only when Maurice has thrown over both proscriptions--that of class and of sex--can he "fully bring out the hero": to "live outside class, without relations or money," and to understand that love must be its own reward for an "outlaw" in England.
In many ways, "Maurice" is the least polished of Forster's books--if one judges such things on the basis of prose style and narrative structure alone. Scenes often feel sketched; transitional elements are scant; characters enter and exit the stage willy-nilly. Perhaps because the manuscript was revised in 1960, it has an occasionally minimalist, even modernist tone. Yet the abandonment of traditional considerations suits the story--and Forster has instead created two fully realized characters in what is surely his most caustic, most emotionally raw satire of British manners.
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| The Beginning for Me |
| Customer Rating: 4 out of 5 |
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Maurice is one of the greatest books I have ever read. In terms of a gay novel, it is the only one that I can really stand. And it is the best one I have read thus far. This novel helped me to hope and dream at the start of a long sexual journey (I'm still young, so I have a long way to go).
Now, you might wonder for all my high praises, why I didn't give Maurice five stars. Maurice is not a simple a novel as one might figure. It's extremely layered, and more than most novels esp. the 'classics' different people get widely different things from it. If you read it at the surface, you get the story of the sexually confused/frustrated Maurice Hall who falls in and out of love with Clive, and eventually forms a lifelong companionship with Alec Scudder, a man of the lower classes who works on Clive's estate. But if you look closer, then look away real quickly the picture becomes clearer. Archetypes form, and a beautiful story takes shape. It might not come to you like a bolt, but more like a rainy day that floods the passages of the mind until it spills all over.
I must say though that while I commend Mr. Forster for his presence in the literary landscape, but I feel like he didn't work to his potential. I think he was bound by the time he was born in. If he was born nearly 100 years later, Maurice would have been a bestseller and a classic.
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