When Maurice, the latecomer among Forster's completed novels, was published posthumously in 1971, many reviewers saw the book as a failure. Time and again the text was seen as 'simple' and dated in its treatment of homosexuality. Often behind the negative assessment of the novel was the view that a text addressing male-male desire could not be good art. Philip Toynbee, writing in the Observer, found Maurice 'novelettish, ill-written, humourless and deeply embarrassing'. He argued that among the 'special restraints' that made Forster's other novels a success was that 'he should not express his homosexual feelings directly'. Forster's talents were best confined by a 'millrace', and it was the very channelling of his energies through the exclusion of homosexuality that gave his other work its force. For Toynbee, homosexual experience was best left on the bank, outside representation and the creative process. Subsequent critics reacted strongly to the initial reception to the novel, exploring it in the context of 1913-14, when it was first drafted. However, the view of the text as straightforward and unsophisticated has remained in place. It is that position that I want to challenge here, and to make the case for Maurice as a thoughtful adaptation of the novel form to the subject matter and a strong intervention in debates of the time.

Maurice can be seen as highly conventional, combining two of the main masterplots of the novel as a genre, the Bildungsroman and the 'marriage plot'. It is, though, also a new departure for the novel, as Forster had to meet the technical challenge of writing a Bildungsroman where the result of the protagonist's engagement with society is the decision to live outside it, and a 'marriage plot' where the lovers are two men.