he is more pleasant or less selfish-—-somewhat like Face in The Alchemist. We will wish to make use of this little volume both for ourselves and our students. We owe Professor Hibbard gratitude for presenting an intelli gently edited text of a masterpiece and a graceful, sensible, and perceptive discussion of this panoramic play. f . david hoeniger / University of T oronto John Sayre Martin, E. M. Forster: The Endless Journey (Cambridge: Cam bridge University Press, 1976), viii, 174. Cloth $14.95, paper $3.95. Norman Page, E. M. Forster’s Posthumous Fiction (Victoria: University of Victoria, 1977). 107. $3.75 The publication of E. M. Forster’s posthumous fiction, Maurice and The Life To Come, has led to renewed and vigorous interest in the Forster canon. Two such books that provide productive examination and re-evaluation are John Sayre Martin’s E. M. Forster: The Endless Journey and Norma Page’s E. M. Forster’s Posthumous Fiction. Both are excellent studies. Readers of Forster have generally been puzzled and intrigued by the fact that Forster, after an initial and relatively prolific output of five solid novels and numerous short stories, ceased publication of fiction in 1924 with A Passage to India, though he himself lived until 1970. One possible explana tion for this literary silence that Forster himself provided is given in a diary note of 16 June 1911 (the year after Howards End was published and thir teen years before A Passage to India) : “weariness of the only subject that I both can and may treat — the love of men for women and vice versa” (10). Page also points to a second diary entry half a century later (31 December 1964) when Forster admits: “I should have been a more famous writer if I had written or rather published more, but sex has prevented the latter” (11). With his death Forster’s homosexuality became known (P. N. Furbank’s essay, “The Personality of E. M. Forster” ). The subsequent publication of Maurice and the eight short stories, his hitherto unpublished or ‘private’ fiction dealing with homosexuality, helps explain the fictional silence and clarifies many of the personal attitudes that underly his ‘public’ fiction. This view is reinforced by the information that Maurice was “Begun in 1913. Finished 1914” (see dedication) and reworked in 1919, 1932, and 1959-60 (10). That Forster’s early work was published barely ten years after Oscar Wilde was imprisoned for sodomy indicates the legal conditions and atmos phere that prevailed during the period and that affected Forster’s fictional output. As Page states 366 There seem to have been both personal and external reasons why Forster did not seek to publish these works. The prospect of causing pain to certain members of his family and friends must have been a sufficient deterrent for many years (his mother, for instance, lived until 1945). But in any case the level of public, or at any rate official, tolerance was scarcely high enough until near the end of Forster’s lifetime to permit the publication of fiction dealing frankly with homosexual themes. At the time he was writing, the law relating to the common law misdemeanour of obscene libel had stood virtually unchanged for some two hundred years; it was to be another full generation before chance came. (11) The temptation to re-interpret all of Forster’s early work in terms of his homosexuality has been resisted by both critics. In his monograph Page con centrates on the posthumous fiction while Martin assesses the entire canon inclusive of the latest fiction. Page argues that “large-scale reinterpretation is surely premature, and in any case may not involve any drastic modification of the way in which we read his books or any radical reassessment of their value, though there will no doubt be local and minor readjustments to be made. When the authorized biography of Forster is published, and eventually his letters, diaries and notebooks become available, it will be time enough to reconsider his work as a whole” (19). What Page does, and does admirably, is to re-evaluate Maurice and The Life To Come now that the dust has, so to speak, settled since the...