Em Forster - an Edwardian Novelist

Novelist, Essayist, Biographer, Story Writer, Travel Writer, Letter Writer, Teacher, Critic, Librettist.

Active 1905-1970 in England, Britain, Italy, Europe, India, South Asia

Forster was principally an Edwardian novelist concerned with the restrictions placed on personal freedom by English sensibilities, but his later work, especially his last novel, A Passage to India (1924), can be called Modernist in its use of symbolism and its style of repetition-with-variation (which Forster called "rhythm" in his 1927 book on fiction Aspects of the Novel). Forster, who lived most of his later life at King's College, Cambridge, was one of the less prominent figures in the Bloomsbury Group, a lifelong member of the Labour Party, and an agnostic. He was also an avowed liberal humanist who believed strongly in personal relationships: he famously wrote in "What I Believe" in 1939 that he would sooner betray his country than his friend. His early novels and stories use Italy, and to a lesser extent Greece, as a vibrant, life-affirming antithesis to the stultifying repression of England. His homosexual novel, Maurice, written in 1913-14, was only published posthumously.

Edward Morgan Forster was born in London on January 1st 1870, the year before his father's death, and educated at private schools in Eastbourne and Tonbridge Wells. In 1887 he inherited Ј8,000 from his great-aunt, Marianne Thornton, about whom he later wrote a "domestic biography". From 1897, he attended King's College Cambridge where he read classics and history, partly under the supervision of Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, of whom he also wrote a biography. At Cambridge he came under the influence of the philosopher G. E. Moore and the aesthetic belief that the purpose of life is to contemplate beauty in art and to cultivate friendships in life. Forster was elected to the "Apostles" clique of Cambridge intellectuals and through them met members of the Bloomsbury Group After Cambridge, in 1901 he went on a one year's tour of Italy and Austria with his mother. Around this time he also began writing. The next year he taught at the Working Men's College and subsequently at the extra-mural department of the Cambridge Local Lectures Board, lecturing on Italian art and history. His first story "Albergo Empedocle" appeared in Temple Bar in December 1903 and in the following year he started contributing stories to the Cambridge-based journal Independent Review.

Forster's first published novel was Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), a story about Anglo-Italian contrasts that sets the passionate world of Italy Forster had seen on his travels against the cool, reserved values of suburban England. A social comedy for most of its length it ends as a tragedy with death and frustrated love as the English, briefly taken out of themselves, return to their narrow lives in the southern counties. In the year of its publication, Forster spent several months in Nassenhalde, Germany, as tutor to the Countess von Arnim: an experience that, like his friendship with Virginia and Vanessa Stephen, would inform his portrait of the Schlegel sisters in Howards End. In 1907 he worked as a private tutor for an Indian Muslim, Syed Ross Masood, with whom he developed a close friendship and love, and to whom A Passage to India is dedicated. Also in 1907, Forster saw published the novel of his Cambridge days, The Longest Journey, which remained his favorite novel despite its comparatively low critical standing. It tells the story of an orphaned undergraduate and then struggling writer, Rickie, who abandons his close friend Ansell for a loveless marriage but is partially enlightened by the free spirit of his wayward, pagan Wiltshire half-brother Stephen. At this time, Forster also associated more often with the Bloomsbury Group, becoming a close friend of the Woolfs, Lytton Strachey, and Roger Fry. The following year his second Anglo-Italian novel, A Room with a View, was published: a story of misunderstandings and English snobbery which this time ends happily as the heroine Lucy Honeychurch realises in time her love for the impulsive George Emerson over the effete intellectual Cecil Vyse. However, it was Howards End in 1910 that was Forster's first considerable success and the book that secured his reputation. This is a condition-of-England novel about sections of the middle-classes which focuses on the question: who will inherit Howards End, Forster's metonym for England based on his childhood home of Rook's Nest. The story centres on the relationship between the intellectual German Schlegel sisters and the practical, male-dominated, business-oriented Wilcox family. In the novel, ambitiously if not wholly convincingly, Forster attempts to find a way for Wilcox money to become the support for Schlegel culture, and also for the future of rural England to be wrested from urban, commercial interests and placed once more in the hands of the yeomanry.

Now an established novelist, the hitherto prolific Forster took his foot off the pedal with regard to fiction and was to publish only one novel in the rest of his life, though 1911 saw the release of a collection of his short stories as The Celestial Omnibus. In 1912-13 he made his first visit to India, with R. C. Trevelyan, Dickinson, and G. H. Luce, and soon after Forster began writing an early draft of A Passage to India. He also worked on the homosexual novel that was not published until after his death, Maurice: A Romance (1971). This novel, circulated privately at the time, is a story of cross-class love that for the