‘Scenes of marvellous variety’: The work-in-progress screenplays of Maurice

This article examines the work-in-progress screenplays of Maurice by Ivory (1987), which was adapted from E. M. Forster’s novel, published posthumously in 1971. The article examines the creative processes revealed in the writers’ treatment, and three manuscripts of the screenplay, held at King’s College, Cambridge, all of which differ from the film as it has subsequently been released in cinemas and on DVD. Writers James Ivory and Kit Hesketh-Harvey restructured the narrative order of the story in several different ways, before the film was eventually edited to follow (almost) the chronology of the novel. The screenplay was also significantly shaped through the collaborative assistance of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, who is not credited as a writer for the film. This article charts these hitherto hidden creative and authorial processes, and argues that the narrative’s journey from page to screen was not a straight trajectory, but instead constituted a move away from mainstream narrative genres, such as the Bildungsroman and the love story, and then a recommitment to them in the film’s ‘final’ cut. The multiple versions of the screenplay add to the palimpsetuous inscriptions of this already multi-layered, in-flux narrative, which was revised repeatedly by E. M. Forster over a 45-year period, and has also been reworked through new book editions, a re-release of the DVD that includes deleted scenes as ‘extras’, and fan activity on the Internet.