An account of Maule's time as an undergraduate recalls him as a man, who, even at 19, had seemed extraordinary, best read of anyone I've ever met, stuffed with obscure nuggets of literary and historical quotations, out of time in 1970s Oxford, in a tweed Norfolk jacket into which his mother had sown a plethora of always full book pockets.... leaning out of a train window after my 21st birthday party calling "don't forget to feed the parrot" (it was some time before I tracked this apparent non-sequitur down to Cold Comfort Farm), impossible to keep up with as he strode across any quad, retracing Stevenson's journey across the Cevennes (though without a donkey), writing a mock epic in rhyming heroic couplets about a holiday I took in Greece with a friend...[2]Maule went on to work for seven years as a researcher in the House of Lords library (his acquaintance Philip Hensher later held a similar position).
A don of the old school, he was resident in college and readily embraced the responsibility of teaching by tutorial, being more concerned with inspiring those he taught and supervised than with producing publications of his own.
Four volumes appeared, under the general editorship of Marie Axton, on subjects as diverse as dance,[4] female (auto)biography,[5] and rhetoric,[6] reflecting Maule's own multifarious interests and exacting qualities as an editor.
[7] As this suggests, Maule had a particular interest in manuscript research–latterly he taught post-medieval palaeography to graduate literature students in Cambridge–and himself made a number of significant discoveries.
[13] At his death he was engaged in producing editions of the poetry of Mildmay Fane, second earl of Westmorland,[14] and also Andrew Marvell's Mr. Smirke; Or, the Divine in Mode.