And in Howards End, the upper middle class Schlegal sisters desire to help and support the lower middle class insurance clerk, Leonard Bast, who hesitatingly displays an artistic soul beneath his brusque exterior. In A Room With A View, for example, the upper middle class Lucy Honeychurch falls in love with and marries the lower middle class railway clerk, George Emerson. The desire to cross the strict class boundaries of Edwardian Britain and to ‘only connect’ is evident in many of Forster’s novels, including A Room With A View and Howards End. So much for the plot, but what interests me more about Forster’s novel is how the middle class Maurice finds true happiness with a working class man, as well as the similarities between Maurice & DH Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. After a difficult start to their relationship in which Maurice suspects Alec of wanting to blackmail him for being a homosexual predator, the two fall in love and live a happy life together. When his treatment ultimately fails to ‘cure’ him, Maurice meets Alec Scudder, a gamekeeper on Clive’s country estate. Soon after, Maurice makes an appointment with a hypnotist in an attempt to ‘cure’ himself of being an ‘unspeakable of the Oscar Wilde sort’. Their relationship ends after 2-3 years when Clive declares to Maurice that he is ‘normal’ and is to marry Anne Woods. As an undergraduate student at Cambridge University, Maurice meets and falls in love with the aristocratic Clive Durham.

Written in 1913, Maurice is a bildungsroman which tells the story of the homosexual awakening of the young suburban stockbroker, Maurice Hall.

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