Maurice Study Guide

E.M. Forster was an English novelist born in London in 1879. He is most well-known for his novels A Passage to India (1924) and Howards End (1910) and is one of the most celebrated writers of the Edwardian era. Forster’s father died soon after Forster was born, and he was raised by his mother and various aunts. He attended public school (which is actually similar to private school in the U.S.) at Tonbridge School before studying history and classics at King’s College, Cambridge. While at Cambridge, he joined a discussion group called Christian Apostles, which shaped his progressive ideas and contributed to his decision to renounce his Christian faith. After graduating, he received a sizeable inheritance from his great-aunt Marianne Thornton, which enabled him to pursue a life of writing without significant material concerns. In a colloquial and often comic tone, his novels explore issues of class, politics, religion, and morality. During his life, Forster was open with close friends about being gay but was not publicly out. His novel Maurice, a gay love story, was written in 1913-1914 but was not published until 1971, a year after Forster’s death in 1970.

In 1533, King Henry VIII passed the Buggery Act 1533, which made all sexual activity between two men punishable by death in England. This law remained in effect until it was replaced by the Offences Against the Person Act in 1828, though “buggery” (men having sex with men) continued to be punishable by death until 1861. In 1895, the writer Oscar Wilde was sentenced to two years of prison with hard labor for “gross indecency” on account of having engaged in “homosexual acts.” Forster wrote Maurice between 1913 and 1914, a period that was in this same deeply homophobic political, legal, and social climate. Owing to that climate, Forster never tried to publish the novel during his lifetime; he even wrote a note on the original manuscript, which read, “Publishable, but worth it?” Homosexuality remained outlawed in England until 1967, and Maurice was published shortly after, in 1971, after Forster’s death in 1970. 

At Cambridge, Forster joined the Cambridge Apostles, a debate group that met in secret to discuss politics and morality. Many of the members of that group, including Forster, became part of the Bloomsbury Group. One of the most well-known books to come from a member of that group is Mrs. Dalloway by  Virginia Woolf. Shortly after Forster wrote Maurice, D. H. Lawrence published Lady Chatterley’s Lover, a novel that features a romance between a gamekeeper and an upper-class woman. There is speculation that Lawrence, who was friends with Forster, read an early draft of Maurice and based his characters on those of Forster’s then-unpublished novel, though that speculation has not been confirmed. Regardless, when Penguin published the uncensored version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover in 1960, Forster vociferously defended Lawrence’s work when it became subject to an obscenity trial in England. In his afterword to Maurice, Forster writes that his novel was dated by the years between when it was written and when it was published. In those intervening years, other seminal works of gay literature, including Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin were published. Forster’s other novels, including Howards End and A Passage to India, touch on similar themes as Maurice, such as religion, morality, and class. The book also amply references the works of Ancient Greece and Plato in particular, with special attention paid to Plato’s Symposium.