E.M. Forster: The Secret of a Happy Ending
In 1913, E.M. Forster visited Edward Carpenter and his male partner George Merrill at their cottage near Sheffield. During the visit, Merrill touched Forster on his lower back. Forster would later recount this gesture to be electric, and the effect it had on Forster’s creativity was similarly so. The incident would spark Forster into penning Maurice: a novel about two men who fall in love, and against every convention of the time, stay together. Forster completed the novel in 1914, but never published it in his lifetime. It only appeared in 1971, the year after Forster’s death, exactly as he had written it. For many, Forster’s Maurice is understood to be the definitive breakthrough queer novel in history.
The most remarkable thing about Maurice isn’t that it exists, despite being written in the long shadow of the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act, which criminalised ‘gross indecency’ between men. The most remarkable thing is its ending. The two men are together. Happy. In 1914, literary convention dictated that gay love stories had to end in death, disgrace, or renunciation of sexuality. Forster refused. He would go on to unpack his thinking on Maurice in his Terminal Note, explaining his deliberate choice to insist on joy: ‘happiness is its keynote’. Forster rejected that the novel should end unhappily, ‘with a lad dangling from a noose, or with a suicide pact’. This choice, to insist on joy when society demanded punishment, is undoubtedly Forster’s most courageous literary act.
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Only Connect
Forster (1879–1970) was one of the most acclaimed British novelists of the 20th Century. A Room with a View, Howards End, and A Passage to India established him as a writer of extraordinary sensitivity about class, culture, and human connection. He was a member of the Bloomsbury Group, a humanist, and in his way, a quiet radical. His famous epigraph ‘Only connect’ that appeared in Howards End is a call and instruction for people to stop living their lives in fragments, and to share a common humanity. It has become one of the most quoted phrases in English literature.
Forster was gay, and due to societal pressures at the time, therefore knew from early adulthood that this placed a wall between his public and private selves as an aspiring writer. His published novels are, in retrospect, full of coded longing: characters reach across the barriers of class and convention, seeking human connection in a world that strongly discouraged it. The longing in Maurice is where these barriers break. The queer longing becomes explicit, the connection is made, and it holds.
A happy ending was imperative. I shouldn’t have bothered to write otherwise! I was determined that in fiction anyway two men should fall in love and remain in it for the ever and ever that fiction allows, and in this sense Maurice and Alec still roam the greenwood.
~ Terminal Note on Maurice, E.M. Forster
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The Closet and the Drawer
Forster showed Maurice to a small number of his trusted friends. Whilst some admired it, others worried about what publication might mean for him. Forster himself understood the impossibility of the novel: it couldn’t be published whilst homosexuality remained a criminal offence, but he refused to alter the ending to make it publishable. For Forster, the happy ending was the entire point. Without it, the novel was just another gay tragedy. The happy ending was the point.
Forster could not publish Maurice without changing the happy ending. But the happy ending was the point.
Forster put the novel in a drawer, where it sat for 57 years. Forster would subsequently write a Terminal Note on his motivation for the novel, and make occasional revisions, but the core of the book never changed. Two men choose each other over the demands and expectations of society. When Maurice was finally published in 1971, it was a revelation. It shone an explanatory light on why Forster’s novelist career suddenly stopped, despite continuing a long distinguished life of essays, lectures, and broadcasts. Forster wanted to write about gay life, and anything else felt like a compromise. It was a compromise Forster wasn’t prepared to make.
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The Essential Reading
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Why This Matters Today
Forster was unrepentant in giving Maurice a happy ending. In an era when queer novels were required to end in tragedy and societal punishment, he quietly wrote a novel where two men love each other and survive. His refusal to let convention dictate the shape of a love story is an inspiration for every writer and reader.
The novel outlasted the law that made it unpublishable. When it was finally revealed to the world, it said what Forster had been trying to say since 1914. That if we were to only connect, we would see that love between men is not a tragedy. It is life. It is love. And every life and love deserves a happy ending.
