E. M. Forster

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Edward Morgan Forster
Image:Forster young.jpg E. M. Forster aged 36 in 1915
Born	1 January 1879 Marylebone, London, England
Died	7 June 1970 Coventry, Warwickshire, England

Edward Morgan Forster, OM, (January 1, 1879 – June 7, 1970) was an English novelist, short story writer, and essayist. He is most famous for his novels, most of which have been filmed. Forster is also known for a creed of life which can be summed up in the epigraph to his 1910 novel Howards End, "only connect". Forster was homosexual, but this fact was not made public during his lifetime.[1]

Contents 1 Life 2 Novels 3 Key themes 4 Notes 5 Notable works by Forster 5.1 Novels 5.2 Short stories 5.3 Plays and Pageants 5.4 Film Scripts 5.5 Libretto 5.6 Collections of essays and broadcasts 5.7 Literary criticism 5.8 Biography 5.9 Travel writing 5.10 Miscellaneous writings 6 Notable films based upon novels by Forster 7 Secondary Works on Forster 8 External links

Life

Born in London, the son of an architect, Forster was to have been named Henry but was baptised Edward by accident. Among his ancestors were members of the Clapham Sect. As a boy he inherited £8,000 from his paternal aunt Marianne Thornton, daughter of the abolitionist Henry Thornton, which was enough to live on and enabled him to become a writer. He attended Tonbridge School in Kent as a day boy.

At King's College, Cambridge between 1897 and 1901, he became a member of the Apostles (formally named the Cambridge Conversazione Society), a discussion society. Many of its members went on to constitute what came to be known as the Bloomsbury Group, of which Forster was a peripheral member in the 1910s and 1920s. There is a famous account of Forster's Cambridge and that of his fellow Apostles at the beginning of The Longest Journey.

After leaving university he traveled on the continent with his mother and continued to live with her at Weybridge and Abinger Hammer in Surrey until her death in 1945. His early novels, set in England and Italy, were praised by reviewers but did not sell in large quantities. Howards End (1910) made him famous.

He traveled in Egypt, Germany and India with the classicist Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson in 1914. Doing war work for the Red Cross in Egypt, in the winter of 1916-17, he met in Alexandria a tram conductor, Mohammed el-Adl, a youth of seventeen with whom he fell in love and who was to become one of the principal inspirations for his literary work. Mohammed died of tuberculosis in Alexandria in spring of 1922. After this loss, Forster was driven to keep the memory of the youth alive, and attempted to do so in the form of a book-length letter, preserved at King's College, Cambridge. The letter begins with the quote from A.E. Housman "Good-night, my lad, for nought's eternal; No league of ours, for sure" and concludes with an acknowledgement that the task of resurrecting their love is impossible.

He spent a second spell in India in the early 1920s as the private secretary to the Maharajah of Dewas. The Hill of Devi is his non-fictional account of this trip. After returning from India he completed A Passage to India (1924) which became his most famous, most widely-translated, and last novel.

Forster wrote little more fiction apart from short stories intended only for himself and a small circle of friends. People have speculated about his decision to stop writing novels at the age of 45.

In the 1930s and 1940s Forster became a successful broadcaster on BBC radio. He also became a public figure associated with the British Humanist Association.

Forster had a happy personal relationship beginning in the early 1930s with Bob Buckingham, a constable in the London Metropolitan Police. He developed a friendship with Buckingham's wife May and included the couple in his circle, which also included the writer and editor of The Listener J.R. Ackerley, the psychologist W.J.H. Sprott and, for a time, the composer Benjamin Britten. Other writers Forster associated with included the poet Siegfried Sassoon and the Belfast-based novelist Forrest Reid.

After the death of his mother, Forster accepted an honorary fellowship at King's College, Cambridge and lived for the most part in the college doing relatively little. In 1969 he was made a member of the Order of Merit. Forster died in Coventry the following year at the age of 91 at the home of the Buckinghams.

Novels

Forster had five novels published in his lifetime and one more, Maurice, appeared shortly after his death although it was written nearly sixty years earlier. A seventh, Arctic Summer, was never finished.

His first novel, Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), is the story of Lilia, a young English widow who falls in love with an Italian, and of the efforts of her bourgeois relatives to get her back from Monteriano (based on San Gimignano). The mission of Philip Herriton to retrieve her from Italy has something in common with that of Lambert Strether in Henry James's The Ambassadors, a work Forster discussed ironically and somewhat negatively in his book Aspects of the Novel (1927). Where Angels Fear to Tread was adapted into a film by Charles Sturridge in 1991.

Next, Forster published The Longest Journey (1907), an inverted bildungsroman following the lame Rickie Elliott from Cambridge to a career as a struggling writer and then a schoolmaster, married to the unappetising Agnes Pembroke. In a series of scenes on the hills of Wiltshire which introduce Rickie's wild half-brother Stephen Wonham, Forster attempts a kind of sublime related to those of Thomas Hardy and D.H. Lawrence.

Forster's third novel, A Room with a View (1908) is his lightest and most optimistic. It was started before any of his others, as early as 1901, and exists in earlier forms referred to as 'Lucy'. The book is the story of young Lucy Honeychurch's trip to Italy with her cousin, and the choice she must make between the free-thinking George Emerson, and the repressed aesthete Cecil Vyse. George's father Mr Emerson quotes thinkers who were influential on Forster including Samuel Butler. A Room with a View was filmed by Merchant-Ivory in 1987.

Where Angels Fear to Tread and A Room with a View can be seen collectively as Forster's Italian novels. Both include references to the famous Baedeker guidebooks and concern narrow-minded middle-class English tourists abroad. Many of their themes are shared with some of the short stories collected in The Celestial Omnibus and The Eternal Moment.

Howards End (1910) is an ambitious condition of England novel concerned with different groups within the Edwardian middle classes represented by the Schlegels (bohemian intellectuals), the Wilcoxes (thoughtless plutocrats) and the Basts (struggling lower-middle-class aspirants).

A feature frequently observed in Forster's novels is that characters die suddenly. This is a feature of Where Angels Fear to Tread, Howards End and, most particularly, The Longest Journey.

Forster achieved his greatest success with A Passage to India (1924). The novel is about the relationship between East and West, seen through the lens of India in the later days of the British Raj. In it, Forster connected personal relationships with the politics of colonialism through the story of the English Adela Quested and the Indian Dr Aziz and the question of what did or did not happen between them in the Marabar Caves.

Maurice (1971) was published after the novelist's death. It is a homosexual love story which also returns to areas familiar from Forster's first three novels such as the suburbs of London in the English home counties, the experience of being at Cambridge, and the wild landscape of Wiltshire. This novel caused controversy as Forster's sexuality was not previously known or widely acknowledged. Today's critics continue to argue over whether Forster's sexuality and even alleged personal activities^[1] were relevant or influenced his writings.

Key themes

Forster's views as a secular humanist are at the heart of his work, which often features characters attempting to "connect" with each other, in the words of Forster's famous epigraph, across social barriers. His humanist views are expressed in the non-fictional essay What I Believe.

Forster's two most noted works, A Passage to India and Howards End, explore the irreconcilability of class differences. Although considered by some to have less serious literary weight, A Room with a View addresses the way propriety and manners associated with class can limit connection. The novel is his most widely read and accessible work, remaining popular for a near century after its original publication. His 1914 novel Maurice, published posthumously in 1971, explores the possibility of reconciling class differences as part of a homosexual relationship.

Sexuality is another key theme in Forster's works and it has been argued that Forster's writing can be characterized as moving from heterosexual love to homosexual love. The foreword to Maurice expresses his struggle with his own homosexuality, while similar themes were explored in several volumes of homosexual-themed short stories. Forster's explicitly homosexual writings, the novel Maurice and the short-story collection The Life to Come, were published shortly after his death.

Forster uses symbols as a technique in his novels, and has been criticised (as by his friend Roger Fry) for being attached to mysticism. An example of his symbolism is the Wych Elm tree in Howards End; the characters of Mrs Wilcox in that novel and Mrs Moore in A Passage to India have a mystical link with the past and are able somehow to connect with people from beyond their own circles.

Notes

Notable works by Forster

Novels

Where Angels Fear to Tread 1905; The Longest Journey 1907; A Room with a View 1908; Howards End 1910; A Passage to India 1924; Maurice (written 1913-1914, published posthumously in 1971); Arctic Summer 1980 (posthumous, unfinished)

Short stories

The Celestial Omnibus (and other stories) 1911 · The Eternal Moment and other stories 1928 · Collected Short Stories (1947) (- a combination of the above two titles, containing: "The Story of A Panic" · "The Other Side Of The Hedge" · "The Celestial Omnibus" · "Other Kingdom" · "The Curate's Friend" · "The Road From Colonus" · "The Machine Stops" · "The Point Of It" · "Mr Andrews" · "Co-ordination" · "The Story Of The Siren" · "The Eternal Moment" · The Life to Come and other stories 1972 (posthumous) (containing the following stories written between approximately 1903 and 1960: "Ansell" · "Albergo Empedocle" · "The Purple Envelope" · "The Helping Hand" · "The Rock" · "The Life to Come" · "Dr Woolacott" · "Arthur Snatchfold" · "The Obelisk" · "What Does It Matter? A Morality" · "The Classical Annex" · "The Torque" · "The Other Boat" · "Three Courses and a Dessert: Being a New and Gastronomic Version of the Old Game of Consequences") · "My Wood"

Plays and Pageants

Abinger Pageant 1934 · England's Pleasant Land 1940

Film Scripts

A Diary for Timothy 1945 (directed by Humphrey Jennings, spoken by Michael Redgrave)

Libretto

Billy Budd 1951 (based on Melville's novel, for the opera by Britten)

Collections of essays and broadcasts

Abinger Harvest 1936 · Two Cheers for Democracy 1951

Literary criticism

Aspects of the Novel 1927 · The Feminine Note in Literature (posthumous) 2001

Biography

Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson 1934 · Marianne Thornton, A Domestic Biography 1956

Travel writing

Alexandria: A History and Guide 1922 · Pharos and Pharillon (A Novelist's Sketchbook of Alexandria Through the Ages) 1923 · The Hill of Devi 1953

Miscellaneous writings

Selected Letters 1983-1985 · Commonplace Book 1985 · Locked Diary forthcoming 2007 (held at King's College, Cambridge)

Notable films based upon novels by Forster

• A Passage to India (1984), dir. David Lean
• A Room with a View (1985), dir. James Ivory
• Maurice (1987), dir. James Ivory
• Where Angels Fear to Tread (1991), dir. Charles Sturridge
• Howards End (1992), dir. James Ivory

Secondary Works on Forster

• Abrams, M.H and Stephen Greenblatt. "E.M. Forster." The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. 2C., 7th Edition. New York: W.W. Norton, 2000: 2131-2140.
• Ackerley, J. R., E. M. Forster: A Portrait (Ian McKelvie, London, 1970)
• Bakshi, Parminder Kaur, Distant Desire. Homoerotic Codes and the Subversion of the English Novel in E. M. Forster's Fiction (New York, 1996).
• Beauman, Nicola, Morgan (London, 1993).
• Brander, Lauwrence, E.M. Forster. A critical study (London, 1968).
• Cavaliero, Glen, A Reading of E.M. Forster (London, 1979).
• Colmer, John, E.M. Forster - The personal voice (London, 1975).
• E.M. Forster, ed. by Norman Page, Macmillan Modern Novelists (Houndmills, 1987).
• E.M. Forster: The critical heritage, ed. by Philip Gardner (London, 1973).
• Forster: A collection of Critical Essays, ed. by Malcolm Bradbury (New Jersey, 1966).
• Furbank, P.N., E.M. Forster: A Life (London, 1977-1978).
• Martin, John Sayre, E.M. Forster. The endless journey (London, 1976).
• Martin, Robert K. and George Piggford eds., Queer Forster (Chicago, 1997)
• Mishra, Pankaj (ed.). "E.M. Forster." India in Mind: An Anthology. New York: Vintage Books, 2005: 61-70.
• Scott, P.J.M., E.M. Forster: Our Permanent Contemporary, Critical Studies Series (London, 1984).
• Summers, Claude J., E.M. Forster (New York, 1983).
• Wilde, Alan, Art and Order. A Study of E.M. Forster (New York, 1967).
• King, Francis, E.M. Forster and his World, (London, 1978).
• Haag, Michael, "Alexandria: City of Memory" (London and New Haven, 2004). This portrait of Alexandria during the first half of the twentieth century includes a biographical account of E.M. Forster, his life in the city, his relationship with Constantine Cavafy, and his influence on Lawrence Durrell.

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