Strachey’s depiction of Olivia’s sexual and erotic longings is what makes this novel remarkable. Olivia’s “thinly veiled passions” erupt into all that goes with first love: obsession, jealousy, idealization, longing, endless waiting, despair, disillusionment. Strachey takes the reader through all of these stations of the cross of first love.

OF THE HANDFUL of books that informed my adolescent understanding of what it meant to be gay, E. M. Forster’s posthumously published Maurice was the most revelatory. The reasons are numerous, but the most important was that it held out hope to a confused young mind enduring a very dark night of the soul.