A great unrecorded history

by Wendy Moffat

With the posthumous publication of his long-suppressed novel Maurice in 1970, E. M. Forster came out as a homosexual, though that revelation made barely a ripple in his literary reputation. As Wendy Moffat persuasively argues in A Great Unrecorded History, Forster's homosexuality was the central fact of his life. Between Wilde's imprisonment and the Stonewall riots, Forster led a long, strange, and imaginative life as a gay man. He preserved a vast archive of his private life, a history of gay experience he believed would find its audience in a happier time. A Great Unrecorded History is a biography of the heart.