Maurice Hall is a young man who grows up confident in his privileged status and well aware of his role in society. Modest and generally conformist, he nevertheless finds himself increasingly attracted to his own sex. Through Clive, whom he encounters at Cambridge, and through Alec, the gamekeeper on Clive's country estate, Maurice gradually experiences a profound emotional and sexual awakening. A tale of passion, bravery and defiance, this intensely personal novel was completed in 1914 but remained unpublished until after Forster's death in 1970. It offers a powerful condemnation of the repressive attitudes of British society, and is at once a moving love story and an intimate tale of one man's erotic and political self-discovery." "The introduction, by David Leavitt, explores the significance of the novel in relation to Forster's own life and as a founding work of modern gay literature. This edition reproduces the Abinger text of the novel, and includes new notes, a chronology and further reading
Daniel Defoe was one of the most important and best-known writers of the eighteenth century but there is a feeling among scholars that the Defoe 'canon' is a remarkably strange and not very satisfactory construction. Between 1790, when the first bibliography of Defoe appeared, and 1971, when J.R. Moore published the second edition of his Checklist, the canon had swollen from just over a hundred items to 570. A large proportion of these attributions had been made in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, on the basis of features of style, 'favourite phrases' and resemblance to Defoe's known views. This book is a list of all the items in Moore's Checklist (the current authority on the Defoe canon) that at present the authors consider questionable with in each case a note as to who was the first attributer, a brief synopsis and an explanation of the reasons for doubting the ascription.
"Author of that inexhaustibly strange masterpiece Rameau's Nephew, Denis Diderot (1713-84) was also a dramatist, a speculative philosopher, the founder of modern art criticism and a tireless correspondent; he has also been called the most talkative man of his generation. His genius was profoundly subversive, and he spent much of his working life under the threat of exile. The son of a cutler, Diderot had an empathy with trades, tools and machinery that flowered magnificently in some of his contributions to the great Encyclopedie, which he edited with d'Alembert and published over a period of some twenty years. Diderot's range of contacts was prodigious: a close friend of Rousseau, Grimm and d'Alembert, a familiar figure in the literary salons of Paris, he also met and corresponded with Hume, Garrick and Laurence Sterne. It was the support of Catherine the Great (as her agent, Diderot in effect laid the foundations of the Hermitage collection) that led to the most extraordinary episode in an astonishing life: at the age of sixty Diderot travelled to St Petersburg where he drew up outline plans for the conversion of Russia into an ideal republic. P. N. Furbank's sympathetic and probing analysis of Diderot's work and influence was first published in 1992 and won a Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism." -- Amazon.com
P. N. Furbank has fashioned a major biography of E. M. Forster, the renowned author of A PASSAGE TO INDIA, ASPECTS OF THE NOVEL, and other notable books of this century, drawing for the first time on Forster's diaries, personal correspondence, and other sources to produce an intimate portrait of a gently imposing figure in public glare and, until now, in private shadow. E. M. Forster's death in 1970 signaled the undertaking of two of his final instructions: the publication of his self-suppressed, homosexual novel, MAURICE, and the release of all of his papers to P. N. Furbank for the purpose of writing a full biography without reservation or limited disclosure. Furbank has divided this work into two chronological sections. The first part, "The Growth of the Novelist, 1879-1914," covers the first thirty-four years of Forster's life and details his childhood surrounded by doting female relatives (his father had died); his unhappiness at public school and his pleasure at Cambridge; his travels to Italy and Greece, where his serious writing began; his early novels and the startling success of HOWARD'S END that launched him toward fame; his early awareness of his homosexuality; his writing of MAURICE, based on longing rather than reality; and, in 1914, the emerging threat of war. The second part, "Polycrates' Ring, 1914-1970," carries Forster from age 34 to his death at 91; takes him from Alexandria and service with the Red Cross during World War I; to his first abrupt sexual encounter and a more enduring relationship with a young Egyptian; and to his embarking on a HISTORY AND A GUIDE to Alexandria. A year or two after the war he went to India as secretary to a maharajah, and on his return completed A PASSAGE TO INDIA, begun and set aside before the war, and won great acclaim and undoubted fame. Forster's sexual and social "emancipation", through the help of J. R. Ackerley and other younger friends in England, followed, as did his emergence as an active public figure -- polemicist, broadcaster, and President of the National Council for Civil Liberties. In his happy old age at Cambridge, he produced three books, an opera libretto, and a remarkable short story. Furbank's restrained objectivity and meticulous honesty have created a world that no longer exists. Forster is at last clearly seen as a whole -- complex, understandable, yet with an aura of mystery that, despite full revelation, defies total comprehension. At the end, he was very human -- and very touching.
