Maurice was originally written in 1913–14, worked on and revised in 1932 and 1959, and finally published, not long after Forster's death, in 1971. It tells the story of Maurice Hall, product of a solid upper-middle-class suburban background, who goes to Cambridge and there gradually comes to realize that he is what would now be called queer, gay or homosexual. Maurice falls in love with a fellow-undergraduate, Clive Durham, and they are loyal to one another for some two years. Shortly after going down from Cambridge, however, on a trip to Greece, Clive experiences a kind of negative epiphany, summing it up in a letter to Maurice: ‘Against my will I have become normal. I cannot help it’ (104). Maurice, now working in the same London firm of stockbrokers in which his father had been a partner, struggles with a sense of intense loneliness, pain and above all self-disgust at being what he himself calls ‘an unspeakable of the Oscar Wilde sort’ (139). He seeks help from the family doctor, Dr Barry, but his concerns are dismissed as ‘rubbish’ (139). He then goes to a hypnotist called Lasker Jones. Maurice is increasingly ‘in a fury to be cured’ (183); but Jones can do nothing for the ‘young invert’ (187). In the meantime Clive has married an upper-class woman called Anne and, finally able to register that the rejected Maurice must have been having ‘a pretty rough time’ (143), re-establishes an at least superficial friendship with his former beloved. Ironically, it is at the Durhams’ house, Penge, that Maurice meets and makes love with Alec Scudder, the Durhams’ gamekeeper. Scudder is planning to emigrate and seek his fortune in ‘the Argentine’ (189). In a dramatic turn that takes place in the British Museum, it seems Scudder is trying to blackmail Maurice; but they end up once more spending the night together, by this time ‘in love with one another consciously’ (198).