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In this deeply personal episode, Grace Curley explores Maurice by E.M. Forster as both a novel and a life-altering emotional experience. Beginning with the moment she finishes the book on a summer afternoon, she reflects on how profoundly Maurice’s journey mirrors her own: the suffocation of inauthentic living, the fear of the future, and the ache of unrealised selfhood.

The episode traces Maurice’s story from repression and self-denial, through his doomed relationship with the intellectually cautious Clive, to his spiritual awakening through love with Alec Scudder—a love that finally gives him the courage to abandon society and live truthfully.

Grace argues that Maurice is not merely a love story or a coming-of-age tale, but a radical meditation on freedom, identity, and the terrifying, ecstatic act of becoming oneself. It is, ultimately, a story about what happens when a human being stops asking to be fixed—and starts choosing to be free.

NOTES:

- Grace mistakenly mentions it is set in the 18th Century, but it is set in the 20th Century.

- FUN FACT: Maurice was written in 1913, but was only published posthumously in 1971. The movie came out in 1987.

- Please note these opinions are purely subjective.

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