Maurice opens with the eponymous schoolboy taking a walk with his prep school teacher, Mr Ducie. Maurice has grown up without a father, so Mr Ducie takes it upon himself to explain the “mystery of sex” and how the boy will one day settle down and marry. Maurice listens intently since “he knew the subject was serious and related to his own body. But he could not himself relate it; it fell to pieces as soon as Mr Ducie put it together, like an impossible sum.”
The book subsequently follows Maurice through public school and into adulthood, during which he struggles to come to terms with his sexuality. At Cambridge, he befriends Clive Durham, a Greek scholar with whom he has an affair. After Clive leaves him to marry a woman, Maurice visits a hypnotist hoping to be cured of his “congenital homosexuality”. Later, as a guest of Clive and his wife, Anne, in their country pile, he meets and begins an affair with the Durhams’ gamekeeper, Alec.
