ALECBy William di Canzio When it debuted, E.M. Forster’s “Maurice” offered a rarefied view of queer possibility: a happy ending for gay men, with the book’s protagonist, the wealthy and well-educated stockbroker Maurice Hall, finding love with the young groundskeeper Alec Scudder.
The book was originally written in 1913 and 1914, but Forster tinkered with the manuscript for decades until it was eventually published posthumously in 1971.
Thus, he watched his initially contemporary novel age into an embalmed period piece about the crippling, self-cannibalizing anxieties that homosexual men lived with in early-20th-century England.