Maurice

Abinger edition volume 5 of E M Forster's works, with extensive notes

Author

E M Forster, edited by Philip Gardner

Publisher

Andre Deutsch, London, 1999

Printing Details

First thus. Hardback in dustwrapper. 22 × 15cm, lvi + 322pp

Maurice, the last of E M Forster's novels to appear in the Abinger edition of his writings, was originally completed just before the First World War, when Forster was 35, but not published until 1971, a year after his death. The reason for this long delay was the novel's treatment, circumspect yet candid, of homosexuality, a subject which Forster felt put it beyond the British legal pale and would cause embarrassment to his mother and some of his friends.

Despite the difficulty in publishing Maurice, Forster retained a strong attachment to the novel that represented so much personal importance to him. Between 1915 and 1959 he made sizeable alterations to its text, both in addition and subtraction and when published in 1971 it was unique in Forster's work by reason of its sexual openness, the starkness and force of its writing, and by the amount of thought and afterthought that had gone into its composition.

This Abinger edition has aimed to correct a number of errors in the 1971 version (essentially based upon EMF's last revision of 1959) by collating those two texts with earlier manuscripts (1932 and 1914). An editorial introduction and extensive textual notes document Maurice's evolution over five decades, presenting Forster's changing views of the novel and the responses and contributions of his friends, from Lytton Strachey to Christopher Isherwood, and recording all variant readings and discarded passages. The result is a comprehensive and fascinating portrait of Forster's development as a man and as a major literary artist.