26th August

In August 1938 he was thinking about the ending of Maurice. In a letter to the writer Christopher Isherwood he told of 'an Epilogue chapter’ that everybody who read it had deemed 'a mistake’: 'Kitty, on an old-maidish weekend in Yorkshire, comes across them both as woodcutters’. This was not meant to be a simple endorsement of their happiness. Forster added 'I can only still see them together if they have passed a lifetime of adventures together – I have sometimes thought of Alec marrying’. (Source: Selected Letters of E.M. Forster, ed. Mary Lago and P.N. Furbank (London: Collins, 1983-1985), letter of 28 August 1938)


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