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When I first started reading this book, I kept thinking, "I've read this before...when?" but a quarter of the way through this novel I realized I was thinking about Forster's "A Room With A View", a book I read years ago and liked very much. The two books are almost mirror images of each other and have many similarities.
1-Both books mostly take place in the early 1900s in England. (And, they may very well have been written at about the same time. "Room" was published in 1908 while "Maurice" was completed in 1914 but was not published until 1971 due to the subject matter (see below).
2-Both main characters, Marice and Lucy Honeychurch (of "Room") are members of an upper class.
3-Both first become involved with characters of their same class. Maurice with Clive and Lucy with Cecil.
4-Both Maurice and Lucy struggle against the basic roles they are expected to play. Maurice is expected to remain in his upper class and marry in that same class, but Maurice rebels, as he is gay. Lucy wants to break the chains placed on women and go her own way, make her own decisions, much to the chagrin of her fiancé (who proposes to her three times before she finally succumbs to him and to her family's pressure).
5) Both separate from their first relationship: Clive breaks off with Maurice because he (Clive) wants to live a "correct/good" life and thinks he will prosper through a sham marriage. Lucy breaks off with Cecil, realizing he is extremely pretentious and silly man (in comparison to a man she has met on a trip to Italy.)
6) Both wind up with partners below their social class. Lucy with George and Maurice with Alec.
7) For both Lucy and Maurice, there is an instant attraction to/from George and Alex, respectively.
But there is one big difference. "Room" is lighter in tone, mostly because it CAN be lighter, as Lucy can indeed live her life as she wants, in front of friends and family. Maurice is darker, and when Clive leaves him bitter and alone, Maurice seeks professional help: one person suggests that he (Maurice) go for a walk with a gun, but a final doctor simply tells Maurice that men like him have been around forever, that's just the way it is. Maurice accepts himself while Clive, at the end of the book, sadly has to consider how he will conceal the truth of his own life from his wife.
8) And finally, both books have a "happily ever after ending" for Lucy/George and for Maurice/Alec.
Forster knew very well that the public would accept "Room" but not "Maurice", hence "Maurice" was published posthumously. But one of the great things about "Maurice" is that this book avoids the slurs that begin to appear within this genre in, for example, Vidal's "The City and the Pillar" in the 1940s and continue, sadly, to this day.