E M Forster

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Forster, E. M. ( Edward Morgan Forster) (1879–1970), educated at Tonbridge School (which he disliked) and King's College, Cambridge, where the atmosphere of free intellectual discussion and a stress on the importance of personal relationships inspired partly by G. E. Moore was to have a profound influence on his work. In 1901 he was elected to the Apostles. A year of travel in Italy with his mother and a cruise to Greece followed, providing material for his early novels, which satirize the attitude of English tourists abroad. On his return he wrote for the Independent Review, launched in 1903 by a group of Cambridge friends, led by G. M. Trevelyan; in 1904 it published his first story, ‘The Story of a Panic’. In 1905 he published Where Angels Fear to Tread, and spent some months in Germany as tutor to the children of the Countess von Arnim. In 1906 he became tutor to Syed Ross Masood, a striking and colourful Indian Muslim patriot. He then published The Longest Journey (1907), A Room with a View (1908), and Howards End (1910). The Celestial Omnibus (1911) was a collection of short stories. In 1912–13 he visited India and travelled with Masood. In 1913 a significant visit to the home of E. Carpenter resulted in his writing Maurice, a novel with a homosexual theme which he circulated privately; it was published posthumously in 1971. He went to Alexandria in 1915 for the Red Cross; his Alexandria: A History and a Guide was published in 1922. In Alexandria he met Constantine Cavafy, whose works he helped to introduce; an essay on Cavafy appears in Pharos and Pharillon (1923). In 1921–2 he revisited India, and worked as personal secretary for the maharajah of the native state of Dewas Senior. A Passage to India (1922–4), which he had begun before the war, was his last novel. The remainder of his life was devoted to a wide range of literary activities; he took a firm stand against censorship, involving himself in the work of PEN and the NCCL, campaigning in 1928 against the suppression of R. Hall's The Well of Loneliness, and appearing in 1960 as witness for the defence in the trial of the publishers of Lady Chatterley's Lover. In 1927 he delivered the Clark lectures at Cambridge, printed as Aspects of the Novel (1927). King's College offered him in 1946 an honorary fellowship and a permanent home. Forster's other publications include The Eternal Moment (1928), a volume of pre-1914 short stories; two biographies, Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson (1934) and Marianne Thornton (1956); Abinger Harvest (1936), essays; Two Cheers for Democracy (1951), essays; and The Hill of Devi (1953), a portrait of India. He worked with Eric Crozier on the libretto for Britten's opera Billy Budd (1951). Maurice was followed by another posthumous publication, The Life to Come (1972), a collection of short stories, many with homosexual themes.

E. M. Forster (Edward Morgan Forster), 1879–1970, English author, one of the most important British novelists of the 20th cent. After graduating from Cambridge, Forster lived in Italy and Greece. During World War I he served with the International Red Cross in Egypt. In 1946, Forster became an honorary fellow of King's College, Cambridge, where he lived until his death. He received the Order of Merit in 1968.

Forster's fiction, conservative in form, is in the English tradition of the novel of manners. He explores the emotional and sensual deficiencies of the English middle class, and examines its relationship to other social classes, developing his themes by means of irony, wit, and symbolism. He also often treats the contrasts between human freedom and repression. His first novel, Where Angels Fear to Tread, appeared in 1905 and was followed in quick succession by The Longest Journey (1907), A Room with a View (1908), and Howard's End (1910). His last and most widely acclaimed novel, A Passage to India (1924), treats the relations between a group of British colonials and native Indians and considers the difficulty of forming human relationships, of "connecting" ; the novel also explores the nature of external and internal reality. Forster's short stories are collected in The Celestial Omnibus (1911) and The Eternal Moment (1928).

After 1928 he turned his attention increasingly to nonfiction. Notable collections of his essays and literary criticism are Abinger Harvest (1936) and Two Cheers for Democracy (1951). Aspects of the Novel (1927) is a major study of the novel and Forster's most important critical work. In 1971, Maurice, a novel Forster had written in 1913–14, was published posthumously. A homosexual, Forster had refrained from publishing it during his lifetime because of the work's sympathetic treatment of homosexuality. The story of a young man's self-awakening, Maurice treats a familiar Forster theme, the difficulty of human connection. His unpublished short stories and essays were published posthumously in Albergo Empedocle and Other Writings (1972). In all his works Forster's style is impeccable.

Bibliography: See his selected writings, ed. by G. B. Parker (1968); his selected letters, ed. by M. Lago and P. N. Furbank (2 vol., 1983–84); biographies by D. Godfrey (1968), C. J. Summers (1987), N. Beauman (1994), and W. Moffat (2010); studies by G. H. Thomson (1967), O. Stallybrass (1969), P. Gardner (1973) and as ed. (1984), P. J. Scott (1983), and F. Kermode (2009).

Forster, E. M.. (1879–1970). Novelist and man of letters, in Two Cheers for Democracy (1951) he described himself as belonging to ‘the fag-end of Victorian liberalism’. If his spiritual home was in Cambridge and Bloomsbury, he maintained a certain distance. Emotionally vulnerable, he was critical of their intellectualism. The ‘undeveloped heart’ of the English, often most debilitating in the English abroad, is his theme. In the early Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905) he treats it with a light, dry irony recalling Jane Austen, digging deeper for his favourite book The Longest Journey (1907) and even anticipating D. H. Lawrence in his ‘condition of England’ novel Howards End (1910). Visits in 1912 and 1922 shaped his richest work, A Passage to India (1924), more ‘philosophic and poetic’ than before. Thereafter, ensconced at King's College as humanist sage, ‘the fictional part of me dried up’. His one explicitly homosexual novel, Maurice (1914), was published posthumously.

John Saunders

Forster, E.M. ( Edward Morgan) (1879–1970) English novelist. He wrote six novels before giving up fiction at the age of 45: Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), The Longest Journey (1907), A Room with a View (1908), Howards End (1910), A Passage to India (1924) – widely seen as his masterpiece – and the posthumously published homosexual love story, Maurice (1971). He made a significant contribution to the development of the realist novel, and Aspects of the Novel (1927) is a collection of literary criticism. Abinger Harvest (1936) and Two Cheers for Democracy (1951) comprise essays on literature, society and politics.