Critical reception in 1971 was, at best, mixed. C. P. Snow, in The Financial Times, found the novel 'crippled' by its "explicit purpose," with the ending "artistically quite wrong" (a near universal criticism at the time).[9] Walter Allen in the Daily Telegraph, characterised it as "a thesis novel, a plea for public recognition of the homosexual," which Forster had "wasted" himself doing, instead of an autobiographical work.[9] For Michael Ratcliffe, in The Times, it stands as "the least poetic, the least witty, the least dense and the most immediately realistic of the six novels."[9] Philip Toynbee, in The Observer, found the novel "deeply embarrassing" and "perfunctory to the point of painful incompetence," prompting him to question "whether there really is such a thing as a specifically homosexual sensibility." Toynbee went on to state that he could "detect nothing particularly homosexual about Maurice other than it happens to be about homosexuals."[9]
Somewhat more positively, Paddy Kitchen, in The Times Educational Supplement, thought that the novel "should be taken on the terms it was conceived and not as some contender to... Howards End." In delineating "a moral theme," Forster is, in Kitchen's view, "the ideal person."[9] V.S. Pritchett, in The New Statesman, found the character of Alec "a good deal better drawn" than Mellors in Lady Chatterley's Lover, although found the dull Maurice, shorn of Forster's "intelligence and sensibility," to be hardly believable.[9] But Cyril Connolly, in The Sunday Times, found "considerable irony" in the fact that it is Maurice, not Clive, the "sensitive young squire," who "turns out to be the incurable."[9]
For George Steiner in The New Yorker, the modest achievement of Maurice served to magnify the greatness of A Passage to India:
Subtlest of all is Forster’s solution of the problem of 'physical realization.' In Maurice, this basic difficulty had lamed him. Unlike Gide or Lawrence, he had found no sensuous enactment adequate to his vision of sex. Gesture recedes in a cloying mist. The mysterious outrage in the Marabar caves is a perfect solution. Though, as the rest of the novel will show, 'nothing has happened' in that dark and echoing place, the force of sexual suggestion is uncompromising. As only a true writer can, Forster had found his way to a symbolic action richer, more precise than any single concrete occurrence.[9]
