Maurice : a novel / E.M. Forster.

Written in 1914 but not published until 1971, a year after the author's death, Forster's fifth novel was a replacement for the intimacy he lacked in private life. "In Maurice I tried to create a character who was completely unlike myself," he wrote. "Someone handsome, healthy, bodily attractive, mentally torpid, not a bad businessman and rather a snob. Into this mixture I dropped an ingredient that puzzles him, wakes him up, torments him and finally saves him." This ingredient is homosexuality, which in England was a crime and a taboo. "I'm an unspeakable Oscar Wilde sort," Maurice tells a doctor from whom he tries, in desperation, to seek "treatment." Shattered by the loss of his first love to fear and convention, Maurice does not emerge out of his "muddle" until he meets a gamekeeper with whom he shakes off the world that would, in every way, imprison him. During his first affair (with an Egyptian tram conductor) at the age of 38, Forster told a friend, "I wish I was writing the latter half of Maurice. I now know so much more," but he knew enough about sexual oppression to effectively portray it as an issue of social power.