E. M. Forster

Edward Morgan Forster was born on January 1, 1879, in London. His father, an architect also named Edward Morgan Llewellyn Forster, died of tuberculosis before the boy was two years old, leaving him to be raised by his mother, Alice Clara (known as Lily), and a circle of attentive female relatives ^[1]. The most consequential of these was his great-aunt Marianne Thornton, a member of the evangelical Clapham Sect family, who left him a legacy of eight thousand pounds when she died in 1887. That inheritance paid for his education and, as Forster later acknowledged, gave him the financial independence to write without needing another profession ^[2].

From 1883 to 1893 mother and son lived at Rooksnest, a house near Stevenage in Hertfordshire. The place lodged itself permanently in Forster's imagination and later served as the model for the house at the center of Howards End ^[1]. Leaving it, when the lease ended, was a loss he described as one of the sharpest of his childhood.

His schooling was less happy. As a day boy at Tonbridge School in Kent he felt isolated and bullied, and the experience left him with a lifelong suspicion of the English public school system and the character it produced, a type he would later skewer in his essays as the man with a well-developed body and an undeveloped heart ^[2]. Relief came in 1897 when he went up to King's College, Cambridge, to read classics and then history. There he found friendship, intellectual freedom, and election to the Apostles, the university's famous discussion society, whose members included several future figures of the Bloomsbury Group ^[3].

Cambridge gave Forster his subject as well as his confidence. After graduating in 1901 he traveled in Italy and Greece with his mother, and the contrast between Mediterranean warmth and English reserve became the engine of his early fiction ^[1]. He began publishing short stories and essays in the Independent Review, a liberal journal founded by Cambridge friends, while supporting himself modestly through lecturing and tutoring.

His first novel, Where Angels Fear to Tread, appeared in 1905, the story of an English widow whose impulsive Italian marriage scandalizes her suburban in-laws. It announced themes he would never abandon: the collision of convention with feeling, and the moral cost of snobbery ^[2]. The Longest Journey followed in 1907, a partly autobiographical book that Forster himself regarded with particular affection, and in 1908 came A Room with a View, a comedy about a young Englishwoman, Lucy Honeychurch, torn in Florence and Surrey between propriety and love ^[1].

The novel that made him a major figure was Howards End, published in 1910. Built around the question of who shall inherit England, it traces the entanglement of the cultured Schlegel sisters, the commercial Wilcox family, and the struggling clerk Leonard Bast. Its epigraph, "Only connect," became the phrase most often attached to Forster's name and a shorthand for his entire moral outlook ^[2]. By his early thirties he was established among the leading novelists of his generation, and his friendships with Virginia Woolf, Leonard Woolf, Lytton Strachey, and John Maynard Keynes placed him on the edge of the Bloomsbury circle, though he always kept a certain independence from it ^[3].

Any account of E. M. Forster achievements begins with A Passage to India. He first visited the subcontinent in 1912 and 1913, and returned in 1921 to serve as private secretary to the Maharajah of Dewas Senior, a small princely state ^[1]. The novel that grew out of those journeys appeared in 1924. Centered on the ambiguous events at the Marabar Caves and the trial of the Indian doctor Aziz, A Passage to India examined the failures of friendship under British colonial rule with a skepticism rare among English writers of the period. It won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and is widely counted among the finest English novels of the twentieth century ^[2].

It was also, remarkably, the last novel he published in his lifetime, though he lived another forty-six years. Forster turned instead to criticism, broadcasting, and the essay. Aspects of the Novel, drawn from his 1927 Clark Lectures at Cambridge, remains a standard work of criticism, the source of the durable distinction between flat and round characters ^[4]. His essay collections Abinger Harvest (1936) and Two Cheers for Democracy (1951) collected decades of humane, skeptical commentary, including the celebrated piece "What I Believe," with its declaration of faith in personal relationships over creeds and causes ^[2].

Forster was an active defender of civil liberties. He served as the first president of the National Council for Civil Liberties in 1934, appeared as a defense witness in the 1960 obscenity trial over Lady Chatterley's Lover, and campaigned against censorship throughout his later career ^[3]. He also wrote, with Eric Crozier, the libretto for Benjamin Britten's 1951 opera Billy Budd, adapted from Herman Melville's novella ^[1].

Forster was homosexual at a time when sexual acts between men were criminal offenses in Britain, and this fact shaped both his life and his fiction. He kept his sexuality hidden from the general public, confiding only in trusted friends, and he lived with his mother until her death in 1945 ^[3]. In 1913, after a visit to the writer and social reformer Edward Carpenter, he began Maurice, a novel about love between two men that he deliberately gave a happy ending. He circulated it privately among friends but concluded it could not be published while he lived. It finally appeared in 1971, the year after his death, and has since become a landmark of gay literature ^[2].

The central relationship of his adult life began in 1930, when he met Bob Buckingham, a London police constable. Their bond endured for four decades, accommodating Buckingham's marriage to May Buckingham, who eventually became one of Forster's closest friends as well ^[3].

During the First World War, Forster, a conscientious objector by temperament, worked for the Red Cross in Alexandria, Egypt, searching for information about missing soldiers. There he met the Greek poet Constantine Cavafy, whose work he later helped introduce to English readers, and he also experienced his first fulfilled love affair, with an Egyptian tram conductor named Mohammed el Adl ^[1]. Alexandria also produced two nonfiction books, a history and guide to the city published in 1922 and the essay collection Pharos and Pharillon ^[2].

After his mother died in 1945, Forster was offered an honorary fellowship at King's College, Cambridge, and he lived in rooms at the college for the last quarter century of his life ^[1]. He became a familiar and much-loved figure there, hospitable to students and visitors, still writing essays, reviews, and broadcasts for the BBC, where he had been an occasional voice since the 1930s.

Honors accumulated. He was made a Companion of Honour in 1953, and in 1969, the year before his death, he received the Order of Merit, the most exclusive distinction the British sovereign can bestow ^[2]. He is said to have declined a knighthood earlier. Age did not soften his politics; he continued to argue for tolerance, individual liberty, and skepticism toward power in the years of the Cold War ^[3].

Forster suffered a series of strokes in his final years. He died on June 7, 1970, at the age of ninety-one, at the home of Bob and May Buckingham in Coventry, where May nursed him at the end. His ashes were later scattered in the Buckinghams' garden ^[3].

Forster's reputation, unusually, grew for decades after he stopped publishing novels. The posthumous appearance of Maurice in 1971, followed by the story collection The Life to Come in 1972, revealed the hidden dimension of his work and made him a central figure in the study of queer writing ^[2]. Critics and biographers, most notably P. N. Furbank in his authorized two-volume life published in 1977 and 1978, reconstructed the private man behind the reticent public author ^[3].

Cinema gave his fiction a second life. David Lean's A Passage to India (1984) earned eleven Academy Award nominations, and the Merchant Ivory productions of A Room with a View (1985), Maurice (1987), and Howards End (1992) won multiple Oscars and defined the look of British period film for a generation ^[4]. Where Angels Fear to Tread was filmed in 1991, meaning five of his six novels reached the screen.

Among E. M. Forster facts that endure, the simplest may be the persistence of two phrases: "only connect" and "two cheers for democracy." Both compress his belief that private decency, tolerance, and personal relationships matter more than systems and slogans. Novelists as different as Zadie Smith, whose On Beauty (2005) reworks Howards End, continue to answer his books directly ^[5]. A century after Howards End, any serious E. M. Forster biography must reckon with a writer who published relatively little fiction yet permanently altered how English literature talks about class, empire, and love.