E.M. Forster – “Unpublishable Until My Death”
Maurice, and the fifty-seven-year wait
E.M. Forster was part of the Bloomsbury Group and one of the most important novelists of the twentieth century – A Room with a View, Howards End, A Passage to India. He was also gay, and knew he could not say so publicly. In 1913–14, staying with Edward Carpenter and meeting Carpenter’s partner George Merrill, he was inspired to write Maurice – a novel with a happy ending for its gay lovers.
He believed it “unpublishable until my death or England’s.” He was right: it appeared posthumously in 1971, a year after his death and four years after partial decriminalisation. He lived at various Bloomsbury addresses including Brunswick Square, and donated the manuscript of Maurice to King’s College, Cambridge. He waited fifty-seven years to share it. Read Maurice.