Queer Reading Group

For the second installment of our Queer Fiction reading group, we will explore E.M. Forster's Maurice.

With Sanna as our guide, we will be immersing ourselves in a range of LGBTQIA+ fiction, both classic and contemporary.

For the first three monthly meetings, we’ll be looking at the three books listed below:

Tuesday, March 4th - Devotion by Hannah Kent

Monday, April 7th - Maurice by E.M. Forster

Monday, May 5th - Welcome to Dorley Hall by Alyson Greaves

There’s no need to prepare but if you feel like it, please feel free to mention a passage or character you particularly liked (or disliked!) from the novel over the course of the evening.

Maurice is an astonishingly frank and deeply autobiographical account of homosexual relationships in an era when love between men was not only stigmatised, but also illegal.

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A tale of passion, bravery and defiance, this intensely personal novel was completed in 1914 but remained unpublished until after Forster's death in 1970. Compellingly honest and beautifully written, 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.