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Maurice: A Novel
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Manufacturer: W. W. Norton
Author: E. M. Forster
Publisher: W. W. Norton
Average Customer Rating:
Our Price: $11.16
You Save: $ 2.79 ( 20% )
Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: W. W. Norton
Author: E. M. Forster
Publisher: W. W. Norton
Average Customer Rating:
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Maurice: A Novel Description
Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.912
EAN: 9780393310320
ISBN: 0393310329
Label: W. W. Norton
Manufacturer: W. W. Norton
Number Of Items: 1
Book Pages: 256
Publication Date: 2005-12-19
Publisher: W. W. Norton
Studio: W. W. Norton
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.912
EAN: 9780393310320
ISBN: 0393310329
Label: W. W. Norton
Manufacturer: W. W. Norton
Number Of Items: 1
Book Pages: 256
Publication Date: 2005-12-19
Publisher: W. W. Norton
Studio: W. W. Norton
Editorial Review of Maurice: A Novel
"The work of an exceptional artist working close to the peak of his powers."—Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, New York Times
Set in the elegant Edwardian world of Cambridge undergraduate life, this story by a master novelist introduces us to Maurice Hall when he is fourteen. We follow him through public school and Cambridge, and on into his father's firm, Hill and Hall, Stock Brokers. In a highly structured society, Maurice is a conventional young man in almost every way, "stepping into the niche that England had prepared for him": except that his is homosexual.
Written during 1913 and 1914, immediately after Howards End, and not published until 1971, Maurice was ahead of its time in its theme and in its affirmation that love between men can be happy. "Happiness," Forster wrote, "is its keynote….In Maurice I tried to create a character who was completely unlike myself or what I supposed myself to be: someone handsome, healthy, bodily attractive, mentally torpid, not a bad businessman and rather a snob. Into this mixture I dropped an ingredient that puzzles him, wakes him up, torments him and finally saves him."
Set in the elegant Edwardian world of Cambridge undergraduate life, this story by a master novelist introduces us to Maurice Hall when he is fourteen. We follow him through public school and Cambridge, and on into his father's firm, Hill and Hall, Stock Brokers. In a highly structured society, Maurice is a conventional young man in almost every way, "stepping into the niche that England had prepared for him": except that his is homosexual.
Written during 1913 and 1914, immediately after Howards End, and not published until 1971, Maurice was ahead of its time in its theme and in its affirmation that love between men can be happy. "Happiness," Forster wrote, "is its keynote….In Maurice I tried to create a character who was completely unlike myself or what I supposed myself to be: someone handsome, healthy, bodily attractive, mentally torpid, not a bad businessman and rather a snob. Into this mixture I dropped an ingredient that puzzles him, wakes him up, torments him and finally saves him."
Customer Reviews of Maurice: A Novel
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: An Excellent Piece of Literature
Review: "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.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: "England has always been disinclined to accept human nature"
Review: 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.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: The Beginning for Me
Review: 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.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Forster's Most Surprising Work
Review: Born in 1879 England, E.M. Forster attended King's College at Cambridge; thereafter his family fortune enabled him to live as please. He traveled extensively; dabbled in the celebrated Bloomsbury Group, which included the celebrated Virginia Woolf; and strove to conceal his homosexuality from the general public until his death in 1970. Although he was widely read during his lifetime, a series of films based on his novels prompted a major re-evaluation of his work during the 1980s and 1990s, and he is now considered among the finest English prose stylists of the early 20th Century.
Written in 1913, MAURICE (prounced in the English fashion as 'Morris') was suppressed by Forster during his lifetime, and was not published until 1971--when it made quite a stir by exposing the author's long hidden sexuality through its story of a young homosexual man striving to find his way in late Edwardian England. As a teenager, Maurice Hall is given rudimentary male-female sexual instruction, but finds himself vaguely repelled. He quickly develops a sense of alienation from those around him, an alienation that continues unabated until he enters university and meets Clive Durham. Their relationship begins as aesthetic one, but soon evolves into a physical romance in which Maurice believes he has found peace with himself.
Unfortunately, the pressures of society work to separate the two men: Clive is of a socially well-placed family and is unwilling to reject the social and financial opportunities it affords. He ends the affair and continues on to a respectable yet loveless marriage, leaving Maurice to obsess about their relationship and to seek a way of escape from his own differentness. Ironically, a later chance meeting with Clive not only brings Maurice to recognize Clive's failings, it also has the effect of placing Maurice in the path of a new, more compatible relationship.
Forster's works are inevitably centered on class structure and struggle, and MAURICE is no exception: the demands of class force Maurice and Clive apart; the demands of an overbearing and indifferent society drive Maurice to both devalue himself and to seek a cure for homosexuality. In both instances Forster writes with tremendous power grace and clarity of the unthinking brutalities that Maurice must endure and the novel progresses with great power--but only up to a point, suddenly faultering at the end into a series of deus ex machina devices that are abrupt, artificial, and ultimately implausible.
Even so, the novel must be read within the context of its era. Forster was working distinctly new ground; English literature had produced nothing similar to MAURICE up that particular point, and it would be another three decades or more until such novels as THE CITY AND THE PILLAR began to paint a reasonably realistic portrait of homosexual men and the pressures society exerts upon them. Given this, and in spite of the flaws these circumstances produced, MAURICE is a truly remarkable book; although it is distinctly romantic and rather discreet in tone, in many respects it is as modern as today. Strongly recommended, but primarily to established Forster fans and those interested in gay and lesbian literature.
GFT, Amazon Reviewer
still laughing at the negative voter
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Love is just Love
Review: This is one of the few books I plan to read again. What a beautiful story. For those of us who have not had a same-sex relationship, it illustrates that, love is just love, the emotions and feelings are the same regardless. This book was impossible to put down yet difficult to finish and say goodbye to.
Review Summary: An Excellent Piece of Literature
Review: "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.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: "England has always been disinclined to accept human nature"
Review: 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.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: The Beginning for Me
Review: 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.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Forster's Most Surprising Work
Review: Born in 1879 England, E.M. Forster attended King's College at Cambridge; thereafter his family fortune enabled him to live as please. He traveled extensively; dabbled in the celebrated Bloomsbury Group, which included the celebrated Virginia Woolf; and strove to conceal his homosexuality from the general public until his death in 1970. Although he was widely read during his lifetime, a series of films based on his novels prompted a major re-evaluation of his work during the 1980s and 1990s, and he is now considered among the finest English prose stylists of the early 20th Century.
Written in 1913, MAURICE (prounced in the English fashion as 'Morris') was suppressed by Forster during his lifetime, and was not published until 1971--when it made quite a stir by exposing the author's long hidden sexuality through its story of a young homosexual man striving to find his way in late Edwardian England. As a teenager, Maurice Hall is given rudimentary male-female sexual instruction, but finds himself vaguely repelled. He quickly develops a sense of alienation from those around him, an alienation that continues unabated until he enters university and meets Clive Durham. Their relationship begins as aesthetic one, but soon evolves into a physical romance in which Maurice believes he has found peace with himself.
Unfortunately, the pressures of society work to separate the two men: Clive is of a socially well-placed family and is unwilling to reject the social and financial opportunities it affords. He ends the affair and continues on to a respectable yet loveless marriage, leaving Maurice to obsess about their relationship and to seek a way of escape from his own differentness. Ironically, a later chance meeting with Clive not only brings Maurice to recognize Clive's failings, it also has the effect of placing Maurice in the path of a new, more compatible relationship.
Forster's works are inevitably centered on class structure and struggle, and MAURICE is no exception: the demands of class force Maurice and Clive apart; the demands of an overbearing and indifferent society drive Maurice to both devalue himself and to seek a cure for homosexuality. In both instances Forster writes with tremendous power grace and clarity of the unthinking brutalities that Maurice must endure and the novel progresses with great power--but only up to a point, suddenly faultering at the end into a series of deus ex machina devices that are abrupt, artificial, and ultimately implausible.
Even so, the novel must be read within the context of its era. Forster was working distinctly new ground; English literature had produced nothing similar to MAURICE up that particular point, and it would be another three decades or more until such novels as THE CITY AND THE PILLAR began to paint a reasonably realistic portrait of homosexual men and the pressures society exerts upon them. Given this, and in spite of the flaws these circumstances produced, MAURICE is a truly remarkable book; although it is distinctly romantic and rather discreet in tone, in many respects it is as modern as today. Strongly recommended, but primarily to established Forster fans and those interested in gay and lesbian literature.
GFT, Amazon Reviewer
still laughing at the negative voter
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Love is just Love
Review: This is one of the few books I plan to read again. What a beautiful story. For those of us who have not had a same-sex relationship, it illustrates that, love is just love, the emotions and feelings are the same regardless. This book was impossible to put down yet difficult to finish and say goodbye to.