The friendship between E. M. Forster and Forrest Reid has never been studied for an in-depth analysis of the impact and influence Reid and his work had on Forster’s fiction, particularly in honing the articulation of an explicit same-sex love and sexual identity in the widely-appreciated cult-classic Maurice. This paper undertakes such a study—using the unpublished archive of the correspondence between the two authors held at the McClay Library of Queen’s University Belfast, alongside their published writings—to bring out the various facets of their dialectical epistolary, fictive and intellectual engagements to explicate the various developments in Forster’s political and social aesthetic of representation of male-male relations. It argues that Reid’s novella The Garden God had a peculiarly direct influence on Forster’s Maurice. Maurice is also argued to be a self-consciously radical turn away from and furthering of Reid’s work which is similarly restricted in its treatment of same-sex relations as Forster’s own earlier fiction.