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). 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. 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". 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."