The book is based on the historical backdrop of a mental asylum run by Matthew Allen at High Beach in late 1830s and 1840s which had English poet John Clare admitted therein.

[1] In 1836 he started having memory lapses and the next year he voluntarily got admitted in Dr Allen's asylum and stayed there until he ran away in 1841 and went on his four-day walk from Essex to Werrington near Peterborough.

[3] Tennyson left High Beach and then went on to write In Memoriam A.H.H..[1] Allen ran an asylum for mentally challenged people and separated it into three houses; Fair Mead for men, Springfield for women and Leopard's Hill Lodge for severe patients of either gender.

[5] The Independent in the review written by Simon Kövesi, who is editor of the John Clare Society Journal, summed the book to be "a heady mix of delicacy and grotesquery, intimacy and misanthropy.

Writing for The Washington Post, editor Ron Charles notes that the book is not the biography of Clare but "its finely tuned sympathy will bring you close to the soul of an exuberant poet".

The review in New Statesman appreciates Foulds for penning Clare's character that thinks in poems and also deemed Dr Allen and Tennyson's scenes together as awkward because of the historical nature of the book.

[5] Journalist and author Lionel Shriver notes that Foulds, who won Costa Poetry Award in 2008, keeps the book poetic without losing the plot.

"[8] The New Yorker's critic James Wood mentions that Foulds has created his own poems in the book; like "thick curds of summer cloud moving slowly over"; while narrating the two poets and not simply borrowing their works.

It was shortlisted along with Hilary Mantel's historic novel Wolf Hall about Thomas Cromwell, A. S. Byatt's novel The Children's Book, Nobel laureate J. M. Coetzee's novel Summertime, Simon Mawer's novel The Glass Room and Sarah Waters's gothic fiction novel The Little Stranger.

[10] The Quickening Maze was called a "rank outsider" when it was shortlisted with these books: Mantel's work won the award, as several sources had speculated it would.

[7][11][12] The book won the Encore Award for 2009–10 and the judges Alex Clark, Lindsay Duguid and Peter Parker described it as "a confident, beautifully written historical novel, seamed with poetry and intense descriptions of the natural world, which unobtrusively deploys its documentary underpinnings".