Maurice
Forster wrote this novel knowing it couldn't be published in his lifetime, and wrote it anyway with extraordinary openness and hope. Maurice Hall's journey toward accepting his homosexuality and finding love with Alec Scudder. The happy ending Forster gave his characters was, at the time, an act of almost visionary stubbornness.
When it finally appeared in 1971, a year after Forster's death, reviewers were cool: dated, thin, a period piece the author was right to keep in the drawer. Maurice himself is deliberately ordinary, a suburban stockbroker of no great mind, which is the argument and also a long time to spend in his company. The greenwood ending is wish-fulfillment; Forster knew it and insisted on it anyway, and the insistence moves you more than the plausibility does.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
