The Lonely Voice

Abstract

Three posthumous volumes completed the list of Forster’s new publications up to 1980: Maurice in 1971, ‘The Life to Come’ and other stories in 1972, and ‘Arctic Summer’ and other fiction in 1980.¹ This last is a collection of working fragments, fascinating and very valuable for the light that they shed on the composition of other completed works. Maurice, the ‘homosexual novel’ that most of his friends knew about and many had read in manuscript, appeared before the story collection, but it was his work on the stories that inspired Forster to make one last effort to put the manuscript of Maurice into the form in which he wished to leave it to his literary executors.