E.M. Forster
Edward Morgan Forster was born on January 1, 1879, in London, the only child of an architect father who died when Forster was less than two years old. He was raised by his mother and a great-aunt, Marianne Thornton, who left him a legacy of eight thousand pounds on her death — money that gave him the financial independence to write without the pressure of earning a living. He attended Tonbridge School, where he was unhappy and where the stifling social codes of the English public school system first impressed themselves on his imagination, and then King’s College, Cambridge, where he flourished intellectually and where he became associated with the Apostles, the celebrated discussion society whose members included Bertrand Russell and G.E. Moore. Cambridge’s atmosphere of rational inquiry, personal friendship, and aesthetic pleasure became the touchstone of his values for life.
Forster’s early novels, written in the first decade of the twentieth century, established him as one of the most gifted practitioners of the Edwardian novel of manners. Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905) and The Longest Journey (1907) were followed by A Room with a View (1908), a comedy of contrasts between English emotional repression and Italian vitality, and Howards End (1910), his most structurally ambitious pre-war novel, which attempted, in his famous phrase, to ‘only connect’ the inner and outer lives of Edwardian England’s divided classes. These novels established the characteristic Forsterian theme: the collision between those who live by convention and those who dare to feel, and the social and personal costs of that collision.
A Room with a View is among the most beloved of his novels — a witty, warm, and ultimately affirmative story of Lucy Honeychurch, a young Englishwoman on holiday in Florence who encounters an unconventional young man, George Emerson, and must choose between the safe social world she has always known and the fuller life her feelings point toward. The novel is a masterly comedy of manners that uses the contrast between Italy and England, spontaneity and propriety, to dramatize the perennial Forsterian conflict between the life of the body and the demands of social respectability.
Forster’s prose style is marked by an ironic intelligence, a gift for social comedy, and passages of lyrical intensity that break through the social surface to reveal the emotional reality beneath. He writes with the assurance of a man who has thought deeply about the relationship between culture and freedom, and his narrative voice — wry, warm, gently satirical — is one of the most distinctive in English fiction. His final and greatest novel, A Passage to India (1924), a complex examination of British colonialism in India, is widely considered one of the masterpieces of the twentieth-century novel.
E.M. Forster’s influence on English literature has been substantial and enduring. After A Passage to India, he published no more fiction, living another forty-six years during which he wrote essays, biography, and criticism of lasting value. His posthumously published novel Maurice, written in 1913-14 but withheld during his lifetime because of its homosexual subject matter, added a further dimension to his reputation. His legacy is that of a humanist of the finest kind: a writer who believed that the examined inner life was the only reliable foundation for a civilized society.
