In facing any problem, [Forster] tended to define it dualistically. But he could not leave it there. "Only connect" is his prayer and his argument: only connect the prose and the passion, the seen and the unseen, the private and the public, the near and the far, the conscious and the unconscious, the body and the soul. (p. 386)

[What] the posthumously published homosexual fiction (Maurice and the stories in The Life to Come) brings home with special force is just how much the ideal of "only connect" is a wish fulfillment rather than a plan of action. In "What I Believe" (1939) Forster tells us that "Psychology has split and shattered the idea of a 'Person,'" but that we must, for the purpose of living, go on believing that "the personality is solid, and the 'self' is an entity," and that "personal relationships" with that self are possible...