The opening decades of the 21st century have witnessed an amazing boomtime in the world of Young Adult literature. All of life is here in its messy complexity, ripe for exploration and taboo-busting, and with a stroke of genius, Faber & Faber have introduced a classic into the mix, in the form of a YA-friendly edition of Maurice by E. M. Forster. The original text is presented in an illustrated hardcover format, and traces a young man’s homosexual and political awakening in English Edwardian society. Both a commentary on repression and hypocrisy and the tenderest of love stories, this minor classic is ripe for rediscovery.
Emerging from an Edwardian childhood and still within the strict embrace of Victorian morality, Maurice Hall is a confused young man. Blessed with privilege, family wealth, and a place at Cambridge University, his future seems assured. A potential stockbroking career at his father’s old firm, an heir-producing wife, like so many of his peers, Maurice will be ‘stepping into the niche that England has prepared for him’.
But Maurice is sleepwalking through life, pushing aside the remembrance of past boy crushes and pretending to be ‘a piece of cardboard’. His introduction to a clever and charismatic fellow student, Clive Durham, will, in turn, touch him with a ‘breath of liberty’, and shock him to the core of his bequeathed ‘suburban soul’.
Forster’s semi-autobiographical novel was unpublished in his lifetime. He believed that he was writing it only for himself, and that publication, in his words, could not happen ‘until my death and England’s.’ It appeared in print in 1971, a year after Forster’s death, but with England still standing and homosexuality decriminalised.
Readers aware of this and new to Forster’s noble, touching novel will be struck by the suffocating, repressive nature of Maurice’s time and place in history. Cambridge University is a temple to debate and enquiry, but the dons (even in Translation lessons) allow no reference to ‘the unspeakable vice of the Greeks’, a hypocrisy that irks the dissenting Clive. He urges Maurice to read Plato’s Symposium, thereby changing his life forever.
Falling in love with Clive and the promise of an authentic life, Maurice is derailed by a sequence of events connected, ironically, to Clive’s beloved Greece. Becoming aware that men of his sort are open to extortion, doomed to loneliness and damned to hell (the ghost of Oscar Wilde still hovers over high society), Maurice is a lost soul.
Forster’s posthumous novel is filled with passages of power, poignancy, and empathy for a world he could personally identify with. Determined to celebrate the notion of romantic love between men, he refuses to leave Maurice in the abyss.
In this lovely edition, designed with young adults in mind, the illustrations by Luke Edward Hall convey positivity and romance, inviting a new readership to Forster’s gay, coming-of-age period piece.
Complement with the beautiful 1987 film adaptation, starring James Wilby and Hugh Grant.
Maurice by E. M. Forster is published by Faber & Faber, 288 pages.
