Pages Passed from Hand to Hand

Before E. M. Forster’s MAURICE introduced a new openess about the depiction of homosexuality in fiction, a number of novels and stories carried coded, or sometimes uncoded, portraits of homosexuals and homosexuality. A number were published ‘privately’, others were written in ways that could be recognised only by a chosen few. Although a number of anthologies of 20th c. gay fiction have appeared (Ed White’s for Faber, Leavitt’s own for Penguin), this is the first anthology to look at writers before 1914, and it contains many important and fascinating pieces, including extracts from work by Melville, Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, Beardsley, Henry James, E. F. Benson, D. H. Lawrence.