Maurice Hall, age fourteen, discusses sex and women with his prep-school teacher Ben Ducie just before Maurice progresses to his public school. Maurice feels removed from the depiction of marriage with a woman as the goal of life.
After returning home, Maurice learns that George, the servant boy whom Maurice used to play with had left and becomes heartbroken without knowing why. One night, Maurice dreams of a friend who could sacrifice everything for him and vice versa, a friend who would last his whole life.
Some years later, while studying at Cambridge, Maurice befriends a fellow student Clive Durham. Clive introduces him to ancient Greek writings about same-sex love, including Plato's Symposium, and after a short time the two begin a romantic but completely platonic relationship—at the one-sided demand of Clive who's an Hellenistic intellectual—which continues until they have left university.
After visiting Greece, Clive falls ill; on recovery, he ends his relationship with Maurice, professing he is heterosexual and marrying a woman. Maurice is devastated, but he becomes a stockbroker, in his spare time helping to operate a Christian mission's boxing gym for working-class boys in the East End. Around the same time, Maurice realizes Clive's incompatibility with him and comes to terms with their relationship as one that would never satisfy his physical desires, and one that would end badly for both.
He makes an appointment with a hypnotist, Mr. Lasker Jones, in an attempt to "cure" himself. Lasker Jones refers to his condition as "congenital homosexuality" and claims a 50 per cent success rate in curing this "condition". After the first appointment, it is clear that the hypnotism has failed.
Maurice is invited to stay with the Durhams on their estate after Clive gets married. There works a young under-gamekeeper Alec Scudder who becomes interested in Maurice, but whom Maurice was only–and completely—unconsciously attracted to at first sight. During his stay, Maurice also realizes he has already stopped having feelings for Clive. One night, a despairing Maurice calls out in the darkness to the "friend" from his childhood dream. Believing that Maurice is calling for him, Alec climbs to his window with a ladder and the two make love.
After their first night together, Maurice panics over giving his first time to an uneducated lower class man and fears he will be exposed or blackmailed by Alec. He goes to Lasker Jones one more time but the hypnotism fails even more than the first time. On the way home, Maurice finally accepts himself as a homosexual but resolves to stick to his class.
Meanwhile, wounded by Maurice's refusal to answer his letters and treating him as just a servant for sexual service, Alec resorts to threatening Maurice in order to get his attention. Maurice finally agrees to meet with Alec at the British Museum in London. They discuss the situation and their respective misunderstandings, but it soon becomes clear that they are in love with each other after both have become tired of hurting each other.
They spend another night together at a hotel. In the morning Alec tells Maurice that he is emigrating to Argentina with his family. Maurice asks Alec to stay with him and indicates that he is willing to give up his social and financial position, as well as his job to live and work with Alec. Alec tells him that will not work but only ruin them both and leaves. After initial torment, Maurice decides to bid Alec farewell at Southampton. He is taken aback when Alec does not show up at the port but immediately realizes what that means.
In a hurry, Maurice makes for the Durhams' estate, where the two lovers were supposed to have met before in a boathouse at the request of Alec in his letters. There, he finds Alec, who assumes Maurice had received the telegram Alec had sent to him. Alec had changed his mind and intends to stay with Maurice, telling him that they "shan't be parted no more."
Maurice visits Clive and outlines what has happened with Alec in order to say goodbye to Clive and to his old life. Clive is left speechless and unable to comprehend. Maurice leaves to be with Alec, and Clive never sees him again.
Original ending
In the original manuscripts, Forster wrote an epilogue concerning the post-novel fate of Maurice and Alec that he later discarded because it was unpopular among those to whom he showed it. This epilogue can still be found in the Abinger edition of the novel, which also contains a summary of the differences between various versions of the novel.
The Abinger reprint of the epilogue retains Maurice's original surname of Hill. (Although the surname had been chosen for the character before Maurice Hill (geophysicist) was even born, it certainly could not be retained once the latter had become a Fellow of King's College, Cambridge, Forster's own College. It might, of course, have been changed before that time.)
The epilogue contains a meeting between Maurice and his sister Kitty some years later. Alec and Maurice have by now become woodcutters. It dawns upon Kitty why her brother disappeared. This portion of the novel underlines the extreme dislike that Kitty feels for her brother. The epilogue ends with Maurice and Alec in each other's arms at the end of the day and discussing seeing Kitty and resolving that they must move on to avoid detection or a further meeting.
