Maurice – Forster’s Long-Suppressed Gay Classic and Its Quietly Radical Ending

Sebastian Hart

June 10, 2025

A Love Story That Had to Wait for the Right Century

E.M. Forster wrote Maurice in the early 20th century but refused to publish it during his lifetime. He did not want “a story with a happy ending” about two men to appear while homosexuality was still illegal in Britain. When the novel finally reached readers posthumously, and later gained a lush film adaptation, it felt like a message sent forward in time: “This is the ending I wanted for us, even when the law would not allow it.”

The film version, directed by James Ivory, is now a cornerstone of queer cinema. It looks, at first glance, like a Merchant Ivory period piece—carefully lit Cambridge quadrangles, country houses, impeccable tailoring. Underneath the aesthetic polish, however, lies a quietly furious analysis of class, repression, and the cost of choosing safety over love.

Cambridge: Awakening in a Gilded Cage

The first act of the film is pure College Romance trope. Maurice and Clive meet at Cambridge: young, privileged men surrounded by philosophy, rowing clubs, and the vague promise that they are destined for important futures.

Their friendship deepens into something unnamed yet unmistakable. Shared readings of Plato, long walks on manicured lawns, hands held a little too long on staircases—Ivory’s direction lets glances and silences carry more weight than dialogue. For MM romance readers, it’s a blueprint of First Love + Forbidden Love in a setting where the words for desire barely exist.

It is important to remember the legal context. At this point in British history, homosexual acts could land men in prison, as the Oscar Wilde trials had demonstrated. Clive’s fear is not theoretical; it is the air he breathes.

Clive vs. Maurice: Two Responses to Fear

The central romantic tension of Maurice is not a love triangle; it is a divergence between two men facing the same threat.

Clive chooses respectability. He ends the relationship, marries a woman, and pours himself into politics and estate management. His decision is framed not as malice but as cowardice mixed with social conditioning. He cannot imagine a life outside the class expectations he has internalised.
Maurice flails. He tries hypnosis to “cure” his desires. He entertains the idea of a conventional marriage. He grows more miserable and short‑tempered as he realises he cannot simply will himself into heterosexuality.

The film is unusually generous in that it allows us to empathise with both men while making a clear moral argument: choosing safety by betraying love corrodes the soul. Clive becomes a ghost in his own life. Maurice, by staying true to his desires even when he does not yet know how to honour them, stays alive.

Alec: The Groundskeeper Who Changes the Script

Enter Alec Scudder, the gamekeeper on Clive’s family estate. In trope language, he is the working‑class love interest who upends the aristocratic hero’s assumptions:

He is keenly aware of class boundaries but refuses to be cowed by them.
He reads Maurice’s behaviour more accurately than any Cambridge don.
He is sexually experienced, but not predatory; he knows what he wants and asks for it.

The scenes between Maurice and Alec pivot the film from tragic yearning toward possibility. Their first encounter in the boathouse is charged but not explicit; it is the emotional fallout that matters. For the first time, Maurice sees a future that does not involve self‑hate or lonely respectability. Alec gives him both a mirror and a challenge: “If you want this, you have to choose it.”

The Pastoral Ending: Escape, Not Assimilation

Where many earlier queer films ended in death, madness, or lonely middle age, Maurice does something still rare: it lets its lovers run away together.

The final sequences—Maurice breaking with Clive, the clandestine meetings in the boathouse, the plan to meet at the boathouse and leave—are tense not because we doubt the men’s feelings, but because the risk is immense. If discovered, they could be imprisoned or blackmailed for life.

When Maurice finally chooses Alec over the entire edifice of his class, the film’s stately pace pays off. We feel the weight of:

the education he is leaving behind,
the inheritance he might be sacrificing,
the social circle that will never speak his name kindly again.

The last image—Maurice in Alec’s arms in the woods, far from the country house—has been read both as utopian and naïve. Can two men really survive as forester and companion in a hostile society? The film, like the book, doesn’t answer logistics. It simply insists on the moral and emotional necessity of the choice.

Why Maurice Still Matters to MM Romance Today

For modern MM romance readers, used to explicit tropes and contemporary settings, Maurice can feel restrained. Yet its DNA runs through much of the genre:

Class Difference – the tension between gentlemen and workers appears in countless historical MM romances. Maurice/Alec is one of the earliest pairs to treat the working‑class partner as an equal, not a corrupting influence.
Escape to the Countryside – the fantasy of leaving society behind to live honestly with a lover echoes in “cabin in the woods,” “small town restart,” and off‑grid romances.
Earned HEA in Historical Settings – the very idea that two men in 1910 could have a happy ending paved the way for later authors to imagine more such stories.

From a craft perspective, writers can learn from how the film:

uses restraint and implication rather than explicit scenes to communicate intense desire;
gives interior conflict to both men instead of making one purely villainous;
lets secondary characters (like Clive’s wife or Maurice’s family) embody social pressure without turning them into caricatures.

A Cornerstone for Any Queer Film Library

For LGBT Novel Atlas, Maurice belongs in a section titled something like “Queer Classics You Should Actually Watch”—films that are not homework, but emotionally rewarding, even decades later. It is an ideal recommendation for:

readers who love historical MM romance and want to see an early cinematic version of those stories,
viewers interested in how class and queerness intersect,
anyone who has been told that queer people “didn’t get happy endings back then” and would like to see that myth gently but firmly disproven.

Maurice does not pretend the world is safe. It simply dares to imagine that, within that unsafe world, two men might choose each other anyway—and be allowed to keep choosing each other after the credits roll.