All Different Endings of Maurice and Alec from E.M. Forster's Maurice
Having been to the King's College archive myself, as well as read the Abinger edition of Maurice (which examines the differences between various versions of the manuscripts stored at the archive), I can conclude that there are 3 main different versions of the novel: from 1914, 1932, and 1952-1959, each differing from one another in Forster's treatment of the relationship between Maurice and Alec after the British Museum.
1914 version:
Order: British Museum - Southhampton - Penge with Clive - Epilogue
- NO HOTEL SCENE, NO BOATHOUSE
- In this version, Maurice and Alec do not spend the night together after the British Museum; Alec asks Maurice to but Maurice refuses with a long speech about how they shouldn't be together because of their class differences. So they part ways instead.
- Maurice, however, does go to the Southhampton to see Alec off. After not seeing Alec there, Maurice leaves with Reverend Borenius at end of the chapter directly to Penge to say goodbye to Clive.
- The reunion between them is implied first during Maurice's farewell to Clive—"I've wired to him (that I understand why he missed the boat)"—and then specifically illustrated in the written epilogue.
1932 version:
Order: British Museum - Southhampton - Penge with Clive
- NO HOTEL SCENE, NO BOATHOUSE, NO EPILOGUE
- The British Museum chapter is pretty much the same as the published version.
- Maurice and Alec stay the night but there is NO hotel chapter written out. Their night together is only described in 4 lines at the beginning of the Southampton chapter as an "unwise escapade".
- The scene thus goes from Maurice saying "To hell with with it" directly to him at the Southampton.
- The end of the Southampton chapter as well as the farewell chapter with Clive conform to the 1914 version: i.e. no boathouse reunion.
- Epilogue by 1932 had already been disregarded by Forster, so the only clue we have to the reunion between Maurice and Alec is Maurice's line "I've wired to him (that I understand)".
- Therefore the 1932 version is the least hopeful in regards to the happy ending between Maurice and Alec.
1950's version:
Order: British Museum - Hotel - Southhampton - Boathouse - Penge with Clive
- This is basically the final and published version that we all have read.
- The hotel chapter was drafted out in 1952 and added to the 1932 manuscript.
- But it wasn't until 1958 that Forster was able to finally and fully pen out how Maurice and Alec reunite at the boathouse.
It must be noted that Forster had troubles finding a way to bring Maurice and Alec together, and in fact refused to reunite them for decades. The boathouse reunion, Alec sending a wire to Maurice, and Maurice not receiving that wire but instinctively knowing where Alec is nonetheless—all were only conceived by Forster in 1958.
Therefore—and this is really the most touching and important part—according to scholars and editors of the Abinger edition...
"now we shan't be parted no more, and that's finished" were by logic the very last words Forster had written for the novel. Alec's promise marks the end of Maurice's search for a friend, as well as the end of Forster's writing progess for Maurice. It is both a fictional and a real-life farewell.
You went! <333 There are thoughts I could add, but that’s for later.
NB: By ‘scholars and editors of the Abinger edition’, you mean the great Philip Gardner, who is (no exaggeration) a god for his contribution to Forster scholarship (not only as the textual scholar whose close work produced the Abinger Edition of Maurice, but also as the editor of E.M. Forster: The Critical Heritage and Forster’s published journals and diaries).
‘Now we shan't be parted no more, and that’s finished’ is poignant for a yet further reason: as Gardner writes, the words mark the closure of Forster’s journey of writing Maurice (‘that’s finished’) but, Gardner suggests, may also be the very last words of fiction Forster wrote.
You can hear more from Gardner about the complexities of Maurice’s manuscript journey – including what we don’t know – in BBC Radio 3’s wonderful 2018 documentary Literary Pursuits: E.M. Forster's Maurice: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08xcqwk
For my posts in which I shared extracts showing wider significant differences between the 1914 Greenwood manuscript of Maurice and the 1959/1971 published novel, see my Maurice 1914 Project posts (made in 2013–14 in the run-up to the legalisation of same-sex marriage in the UK).
