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Maurice (Penguin Classics) (Paperback)

by E.M. Forster (Author), David Leavitt (Author) "Once a term the whole school went for a walk - that is to say the three masters took part as well as all the..." (more)
4.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
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Product details

  • Paperback: 272 pages
  • Publisher: Penguin Classics; New Ed edition (28 Jul 2005)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0141441135
  • ISBN-13: 978-0141441139
  • Product Dimensions: 19.6 x 12.6 x 2 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 91,823 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

    Popular in these categories:

    #3 in  Books > Fiction > Authors, A-Z > L > Leavitt, David
    #12 in  Books > Fiction > 20th Century Classics > Forster, E.M.

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Product Description

Product Description
Maurice Hall is a young man who grows up confident in his privileged status and well aware of his role in society. Modest and generally conformist, he nevertheless finds himself increasingly attracted to his own sex. Through Clive, whom he encounters at Cambridge, and through Alec, the gamekeeper on Clive’s country estate, Maurice gradually experiences a profound emotional and sexual awakening. A tale of passion, bravery and defiance, this intensely personal novel was completed in 1914 but remained unpublished until after Forster’s death in 1970. Compellingly honest and beautifully written, it offers a powerful condemnation of the repressive attitudes of British society, and is at once a moving love story and an intimate tale of one man’s erotic and political self-discovery.

About the Author
Edward Morgan Forster (1879-1970) wrote six novels - Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), The Longest Journey (1907), A Room with a View (1908), Howards End (1910), A Passage to India (1924). Maurice , written in 1914, was published posthumously in 1971. He also published two volumes of short stories; two collections of essays; a critical work (Aspects of the Novel); The Hill of Devi; two biographies; two books about Alexandria; and the libretto for Britten's opera Billy Budd. David Leavitt is the author of several novels and story collections, most recently The Body of Jonah Boyd (2004). With Mark Mitchell, he edited the Penguin US edition of E.M. Forster's Selected Stories, as well as The New Penguin Book of Gay Short Stories. He lives in Gainesville, Florida, where he is Professor of English at the University of Florida.
Inside This Book (Learn More)
First Sentence
Once a term the whole school went for a walk - that is to say the three masters took part as well as all the boys. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
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Maurice (Penguin Classics)
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7 Reviews
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Average Customer Review
4.6 out of 5 stars (7 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars An Excellent Piece of Literature, 11 Jan 2008
By David Rush "Fasten your seatbelts, its going ... (Glasgow, Scotland) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)      
"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 deeply 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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12 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Foster's Heart, 21 Dec 2006
By Mike Cormack (Aberdeen UK) - See all my reviews
This novel, whilst by no means the greatest of Foster's, does however strike at the heart of the values and ideals his works espoused. While his novels had been written as it were "professionally" (so that he said that of the immensely successful "Howards End", which had preceded "Maurice", that there was no character in it for whom he really cared), "Maurice" is an intensely personal novel. It seems funny to think nowadays, but Forster only fully realised his homosexuality about the age of 26. Initially preferring "Platonic" relationships, he came to value the phyisical aspect more and more, and "Maurice" to some extent documents this.

The plot is fairly simple. Maurice Hall, a highly conventional youth of the pre-World War One era, goes to Cambridge, and there is gradually shaken from his suburban preconceptions. He meets Risley, and through him Clive Durham, and they gradually fall in love. Their relationship is platonic and chaste, rather charmingly. However, Clive (somehow) decided to "go straight", leaving Maurice in an abyss of loneliness and despair. When Clive marries, he goes to visit, and there meets Clive's gamekeeper Alec Scudder, with whom he eventually has a happy, physically-fulfilling relationship.

The main imagery of the novel concerns self-knowledge and self-revelation. Light and darkness are used as appropriate symbols - Maurice seeking the light of (self)knowledge, and is "afraid of the dark". In contrast to "Howards End" the novel is deliberately fragmentary, with short chapters and often some (unexplained) time between them. This suits the subject matter, as Maurice's gradual self-revelation comes to him in fits and starts, not following a smooth trajectory.

Close to Forster's heart are the critique of the middling-classes (Maurice and Clive's mother's are often talking about central heating, i.e. "hot air"); the rejection of Christianity (which foreshadows Maurice's later "corruption); the preference of the countryside as more nourishing and stimulating than "civillisation); Forster's anti-government views (he celebrates "the greenwood" into which Maurice and Alec disappear in the terminal note); and, linked with this, his sexual prefernce for the working-classes, whom he thought freer and more vital than the middle-classes from which he hailed. All of these were particular concerns of Forster's, although he would work these more successfully in varying degrees into "Howards End" and "A Passage To India".

The novel has been criticised for the ending, which many people have found unconvincing. Either the character of Alec is not fully fleshed-out, or the circumstances of their meeting was too unlikey. I think that in the days of particular sexual repression that much had to be read into small hints and clues when people met, exciting little tokens that only those who knew could understand. As for their decision to have a life "underground", well, the novel does also chart Maurice's disillusion with conventional morals and standards, and Forster was excited by the idea of a life with the working-classes. Alec as a character is sketchier than the gamekeeper in "Lady Chatterley's Lover", and his motivations are unclear.

However, Forster aimed in this novel to restore to the human stock homosexuality as something fine and dignified. He undoubtedly acheived tht with this novel, perhaps the first of its kind in English literature.

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1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Wonderfully evocative, 6 Oct 2008
EM Forster's tale of forbidden love in the stuffy upper-crust world of interwar Britain deserves a wider readership. The book is, surprisingly, quite upbeat and not at all doom and gloom. The wonderful descriptions of Cambridge and the English countryside are so evocative I felt as if I could almost smell the freshly-cut grass and overhear the toffs of Cambridge. The book's characters feel very real and, with some notable exceptions, are quite likeable. It's a shame that Forster only allowed this book to be published after his death, thereby depriving a generation. Despite this and after so many years this love story retains every bit of its charm. Definitely worth reading!
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Most Recent Customer Reviews

4.0 out of 5 stars Coming out - or staying in?
I find 'Maurice' a unique work of Forster's; possibly -
even probably - his best written work and a wonderful
vindication of homosexual love. Read more
Published 21 days ago by Peter S. Kinnison

4.0 out of 5 stars A touching tale of human emotion.
Prior to reading Forster's novel, I had effectively written him off as misogynistic critic, bitter about society's treatment of homosexuality. Read more
Published 2 months ago by M. Barr

5.0 out of 5 stars A miniature masterpiece
In an era of politeness and rigid class, Maurice - our hopelessly clumsy and dim hero - discovers his emerging sexual proclivities unsettle the pleasantries of his daily life,... Read more
Published 5 months ago by Daniel Park

5.0 out of 5 stars The Olden Gays
This is a beautiful, and short, story of a gay man's search for love. Because it's set at the start of the 20th century, the main character, Maurice, doesn't know the name for... Read more
Published 14 months ago by Oliver Redfern

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