“A happy ending was imperative,” Forster wrote in the 1960 "Terminal Note" to the novel. He was reacting against the literary tradition of his time. From the moralistic tragedy of Oscar Wilde’s trial to the covert suffering in the poetry of AE Housman, the existing narrative for same-sex love was one of inevitable punishment. Forster, drawing on the proto-liberationist optimism of Carpenter, refused that narrative. He wrote Maurice as a wish-fulfillment, a secret dream for himself and for the "thousands" of others he believed were living in silent agony. The novel follows the life of Maurice Hall, a conventional, unremarkable young man from the English upper-middle class. The arc of the narrative is his slow, painful education in his own nature.
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Clive’s fear wins. After a bout of illness and a friend’s arrest for homosexuality (a plot point mirroring the real-life arrest of Oscar Wilde), Clive retreats into the safety of convention. He marries a woman ("a grey life," Forster notes) and becomes a country squire, effectively breaking Maurice’s heart. This section is a devastating portrait of how society polices the soul. Clive chooses respectability over authenticity, condemning Maurice to a twilight world of self-loathing and hypnotherapy aimed at "curing" his desires. maurice by em forster