Maurice - E.M. Forster

On E.M. Forster’s hidden masterpiece and the cost of living honestly before the world was ready.

Aug 31, 2025

When E.M. Forster finished Maurice in 1914, he locked the manuscript in a drawer. It was too dangerous to release into the world. The novel tells the story of a young man at Cambridge who discovers love with another man—not as scandal, but as ordinary, inevitable, and profoundly human. Forster knew that publishing such a book in Edwardian England, where sex between men was still a criminal offense, could have destroyed his life and reputation. So he waited.

He lived another fifty years. Maurice was only published after his death in 1971. By then, the world had shifted just enough that the novel could appear in print, and readers could recognize it for what it was: not a curiosity, not a relic, but a story that still throbbed with relevance.

What struck me, reading Maurice for the first time, was how modern it feels. Forster doesn’t treat queer love as exotic or shameful. He writes it as natural—full of longing, confusion, joy, and risk. The novel’s drama comes not from caricature, but from repression: the pressure to deny yourself, to perform a version of life that others have scripted for you.

Forster once wrote, “Only connect.” That impulse—to connect honestly with another person—is what Maurice dramatizes. It’s also what institutions like family, school, and church often work hardest to suppress. Reading it now, I can’t help but see echoes of Ethan at Westmore in Line & Verse: a boy trying to pass through fraternity rituals and social chaos while carrying a truth he doesn’t yet have the language for.

When I was in college in the late ’90s, I didn’t have Maurice on my shelf. I had the paperbacks every earnest young man was supposed to read: Hemingway, Salinger, Fitzgerald. If I’d stumbled across Forster then, I don’t know if I would have been ready—or if it might have saved me years of silence.

What I do know is this: when I finally read Maurice years later, it felt like a door quietly opening in a hallway I thought was locked. It didn’t shout. It simply reminded me that love between men has always existed, has always mattered, and has always deserved to be told as plainly as Forster told it.

The story’s afterlife is as important as the book itself. In 1987, Merchant Ivory adapted Maurice into a film, casting a young Hugh Grant before he became the Hugh Grant everyone knows. When I read the novel, I already knew Grant was in the movie. The whole time I was imagining Maurice as Hugh Grant, only to be shocked when I later watched the film and realized he wasn’t the title character at all. That twist in expectation somehow made the story even richer—reminding me that adaptations shape our imagination, sometimes even before we’ve seen them.

For many viewers, the Merchant Ivory film was their first encounter with Forster’s novel—and their first time seeing queer love on screen with tenderness instead of ridicule. The film gave Maurice its cinematic texture: wood-paneled halls, soft English light, and that charged stillness of a world on the verge of change. Like the novel, it refuses to apologize. It insists that this kind of love deserves beauty.

And the ending? Without giving it away, I’ll just say this: Forster made a deliberate choice to reject the tragic conventions of his time. Instead of ruin, Maurice closes with something different—something radical for the era, and still subversive today. It’s an ending that insists on love, connection, and defiance, and Merchant Ivory gives that choice a visual weight that lingers long after the credits.

Why does Maurice still matter now? Because repression hasn’t vanished. In some places, it has only shifted form: from criminal statutes to book bans, from whispered threats to loud political crusades. We live in a moment where queer stories are once again contested, sometimes literally pulled from shelves. Forster’s decision to write his novel in secret was born of fear; our obligation to read it now is an act of defiance.

Reading Maurice is also an act of recognition. It’s a reminder that the ache of silence isn’t new, and that the possibility of connection—despite everything—is older and stronger than repression itself.

If you’ve never read Maurice, now’s the time. Whether you’re discovering it fresh or revisiting it years later, the novel still has the power to whisper across a century: your love is real, and it belongs here.