E M Forster

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, developing his themes by means of irony, wit, and symbolism. 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 His unpublished short stories and essays were published posthumously in Albergo Empedocle and Other Writings (1972).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), and N. Beauman (1994); studies by G. H. Thomson (1967), O. Stallybrass (1969), P. Gardner (1973), P. J. Scott (1983), and P. Gardner, ed. (1984).

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.

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