Maurice
Forster wrote this novel knowing it couldn't be published in his lifetime, and wrote it anyway with extraordinary openness and hope. Maurice Hall's journey toward accepting his homosexuality and finding love with Alec Scudder. The happy ending Forster gave his characters was, at the time, an act of almost visionary stubbornness.
Critics say the back half can't carry what the front sets up. Alec Scudder, the gamekeeper who becomes central late in the book, reads to several reviewers as “almost a stock character, poorly characterized,” with the turn toward him arriving too fast to feel earned. The earlier Clive relationship draws the opposite complaint: one reader calls it “too intellectual and stiff,” while another says of the Alec chapters, “their love was more lust instead of true.” The prose itself is dense enough that whole passages need a second pass. A Kirkus review goes further, calling Maurice himself “one of Forster's flat characters, having qualities rather than personality,” and arguing his late rebellion feels imposed by the author rather than earned by the man. The happy ending, for some, reads now as more political statement than believable resolution.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
