The cross-class relationship between Carpenter and his working-class partner, George Merrill, presented a real-life model for that of Maurice and Alec Scudder.

[3][4] Although Forster showed different versions of the novel to a select few of his trusted friends (among them Siegfried Sassoon, Lytton Strachey, Edward Carpenter, Christopher Isherwood, Xiao Qian and Forrest Reid) throughout the decades,[5][6] it was published only posthumously, in 1971.

Forster did not seek to publish it during his lifetime, believing it to have been unpublishable during that period owing to public and legal attitudes to same-sex love.

Forster was determined that his novel should have a happy ending, but also feared that this would make the book liable to prosecution while male homosexuality remained illegal in the UK.

After visiting Greece, Clive falls ill; on recovery, he ends his relationship with Maurice, professing he is heterosexual and marrying a woman.

Maurice is devastated, but he becomes a stockbroker, in his spare time helping to operate a Christian mission's boxing gym for working-class boys in the East End.

Around the same time, Maurice realizes Clive's incompatibility with him and comes to terms with their relationship as one that would never satisfy his physical desires, and one that would end badly for both.

After their first night together, Maurice panics over giving his first time to an uneducated lower-class man and fears he will be exposed or blackmailed by Alec.

In a hurry, Maurice makes for the Durhams' estate, where the two lovers were supposed to have met before in a boathouse at the request of Alec in his letters.

In the original manuscripts, Forster wrote an epilogue concerning the post-novel fate of Maurice and Alec that he later discarded because it was unpopular among those to whom he showed it.

[9] Walter Allen in the Daily Telegraph characterised it as "a thesis novel, a plea for public recognition of the homosexual", which Forster had "wasted" himself doing, instead of an autobiographical work.

[9] Philip Toynbee in The Observer found the novel "deeply embarrassing" and "perfunctory to the point of painful incompetence", prompting him to question "whether there really is such a thing as a specifically homosexual sensibility".

[9] Somewhat more positively, Paddy Kitchen in The Times Educational Supplement thought that the novel "should be taken on the terms it was conceived and not as some contender to... Howards End".

[9] Cyril Connolly in The Sunday Times found "considerable irony" in the fact that it is Maurice, not Clive, the "sensitive young squire" who "turns out to be the incurable".

[9] For George Steiner in The New Yorker, the modest achievement of Maurice served to magnify the greatness of A Passage to India: Subtlest of all is Forster’s solution of the problem of 'physical realization.'

Though, as the rest of the novel will show, 'nothing has happened' in that dark and echoing place, the force of sexual suggestion is uncompromising.