#e.m.forster

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

“It isn’t possible to love and part. You will wish that it was. You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you. I know by experience that the poets are right: love is eternal.” - E.M. Forster, A Room With A View

[Alive On All Channels]

[septembergold]

[queereads-bracket]

Queer Fiction Free-for-All Book Bracket Tournament: Round 1D

Choose a book:

Maurice by E.M. Forster

The Sign for Home by Blair Fell

Voting ended onMar 8, 2025

Book summaries below:

Maurice by E.M. Forster

Set in the elegant Edwardian world of Cambridge undergraduate life, this story by a master novelist introduces us to Maurice Hall when he is fourteen. We follow him through public school and Cambridge, and on into his father's firm, Hill and Hall, Stock Brokers. In a highly structured society, Maurice is a conventional young man in almost every way, "stepping into the niche that England had prepared for him"; except that he is homosexual. Written during 1913 and 1914, immediately after Howards End, and not published until 1971, Mauricewas ahead of its time in its theme and in its affirmation that love between men can be happy. "Happiness," Forster wrote, "is its keynote. In Maurice I tried to create a character who was completely unlike myself or what I supposed myself to be; 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."

Classics, literary fiction, Edwardian, 1910s, adult

The Sign for Home by Blair Fell

When a young DeafBlind man learns the girl he thought was lost forever might still be out there, he embarks on a life-changing journey to find her—and his freedom.

Arlo Dilly is young, handsome, and eager to meet the right girl. He also happens to be DeafBlind, a Jehovah’s Witness, and under the strict guardianship of his controlling uncle. His chances of finding someone to love seem slim to none.

And yet, it happened once many years ago, at a boarding school for the Deaf, Arlo met the love of his life—a mysterious girl with onyx eyes and beautifully expressive hands which told him the most amazing stories. But tragedy struck, and their love was lost forever.

Or so Arlo thought.

After years trying to heal his broken heart, Arlo is assigned a college writing assignment which unlocks buried memories of his past. Soon he wonders if the hearing people he was supposed to trust have been lying to him all along, and if his lost love might be found again.

No longer willing to accept what others tell him, Arlo convinces a small band of misfit friends to set off on a journey to learn the truth. After all, who better to bring on this quest than his gay interpreter and wildly inappropriate Belgian best friend? Despite the many forces working against him, Arlo will stop at nothing to find the girl who got away and experience all of life’s joyful possibilities.

Contemporary, coming of age, adult

[litandlifequotes]

Life is easy to chronicle, but bewildering to practice.

A Room With A View by E. M. Forster

[dabiconcordia]

“I don’t think I do understand people very well. I only know whether I like — or dislike — them.” — E. M. Forster

[evening-primroses]

“I think you’re beautiful, the only beautiful person I’ve ever seen. I love your voice and everything to do with you, down to your clothes or the room you are sitting in. I adore you.”

Maurice, E. M. Forster

[simplybydreaming]

"Actual life is full of false clues and signposts that lead nowhere. With infinite effort we nerve ourselves for a crisis that never comes."

Howards End, E.M.Forster. p110

[fermencja]

‘He set himself to acquire new habits … He gave up Saturday golf in order to play football with the youths of the College Settlement in South London, and his Wednesday evenings to teach arithmetic and boxing to them. (…) No reward awaited him. This work, like much that had gone before, was to fall ruining. But he did not fall with it, and the muscles it had developed remained for another use.’

E. M. Forster’s ‘Maurice’, Chapter 28