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A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life of E. M. Forster
A REVELATORY LOOK AT THE INTIMATE LIFE OF THE GREAT AUTHOR—AND HOW IT SHAPED HIS MOST BE LOVED WORKS
With the posthumous publication of his long-suppressed novel Maurice in 1970, E. M. Forster came out as a homosexual— though that revelation made barely a ripple in his literary reputation. As Wendy Moffat persuasively argues in A Great Unrecorded History, Forster’s homosexuality was the central fact of his life. Between Wilde’s imprisonment and the Stonewall riots, Forster led a long, strange, and imaginative life as a gay man. He preserved a vast archive of his private life—a history of gay experience he believed would find its audience in a happier time.
A Great Unrecorded History is a biography of the heart. Moffat’s decade of detective work—including first-time interviews with Forster’s friends—has resulted in the first book to integrate Forster’s public and private lives. Seeing his life through the lens of his sexuality offers us a radically new view—revealing his astuteness as a social critic, his political bravery, and his prophetic vision of gay intimacy. A Great Unrecorded History invites us to see Forster— and modern gay history—from a completely new angle.
With the posthumous publication of his long-suppressed novel Maurice in 1970, E. M. Forster came out as a homosexual— though that revelation made barely a ripple in his literary reputation. As Wendy Moffat persuasively argues in A Great Unrecorded History, Forster’s homosexuality was the central fact of his life. Between Wilde’s imprisonment and the Stonewall riots, Forster led a long, strange, and imaginative life as a gay man. He preserved a vast archive of his private life—a history of gay experience he believed would find its audience in a happier time.
A Great Unrecorded History is a biography of the heart. Moffat’s decade of detective work—including first-time interviews with Forster’s friends—has resulted in the first book to integrate Forster’s public and private lives. Seeing his life through the lens of his sexuality offers us a radically new view—revealing his astuteness as a social critic, his political bravery, and his prophetic vision of gay intimacy. A Great Unrecorded History invites us to see Forster— and modern gay history—from a completely new angle.
408 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2010
40 people are currently reading
1137 people want to read
About the author
Wendy Moffat
8 books14 followersWendy Moffat is a Professor of English at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania where she teaches on modern British fiction, the history and theory of narrative, sexuality, modernism, and British culture.
She earned her PhD in English literature from Yale University.
She earned her PhD in English literature from Yale University.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 80 reviews
June 19, 2022
I have never tried to turn a man into a girl, as Proust did with Albertine, for this seemed derogatory to me as a writer.
This is a beautiful multi-faceted biography of the writer E.M. Forster which draws on his private diaries and correspondence with his literary friends and personal connections. We hear his private thoughts, and see Forster the writer, but we also see him as a person, enmeshed in the world.
The result is a richly rendered historical background and context (two world wars!) combined with personal matters. Among the personal matters is Forster's mother, whom he lived with most of her life, and felt smothered by — yet after she died he missed her terribly.
His life intersected with the literati (Auden and Isherwood, T.E. Lawrence) as well as tram drivers and policemen. Forster was a kind, complicated soul, who was gently amused late in life to have become "a great man" — which was the equivalent of a full-time job.
Moffat writes here with grace and fluidity, which makes this wonderful biography a joy to read. Some parts I've already read twice.
This is a beautiful multi-faceted biography of the writer E.M. Forster which draws on his private diaries and correspondence with his literary friends and personal connections. We hear his private thoughts, and see Forster the writer, but we also see him as a person, enmeshed in the world.
The result is a richly rendered historical background and context (two world wars!) combined with personal matters. Among the personal matters is Forster's mother, whom he lived with most of her life, and felt smothered by — yet after she died he missed her terribly.
His life intersected with the literati (Auden and Isherwood, T.E. Lawrence) as well as tram drivers and policemen. Forster was a kind, complicated soul, who was gently amused late in life to have become "a great man" — which was the equivalent of a full-time job.
Moffat writes here with grace and fluidity, which makes this wonderful biography a joy to read. Some parts I've already read twice.
July 23, 2018
2.5*
Before judging my reading experience of this book based on my star rating, let me say this:
This was not a bad book and there are aspects of this biography that provide a valuable insight into Forster's life and work. However, this biography really follows Forster's life from one angle only, depending on what you expect from a biography, mileage on this may vary.
Moffat starts the book with an explanation of her approach, which in turn is based on something Christopher Isherwood said when looking at a stack of biographies about Forster:
"Of course all those books have got to be re-written," he said. "Unless you start with the fact that he was homosexual, nothing's any good."
That is, Moffat is quoting from an Isherwood biography by John Lehmann here, and whether this is a true account or was written as a dramatic embellishment, I could not say.
It does, however, go straight to the heart of Moffat's biography ... and also to one of the criticisms I have.
Moffat does an excellent job presenting Forster in the context of his sexuality, or more precisely his initial struggles with it and the immense pressure he felt of not being able to live openly for fear of persecution and, indeed, prosecution. Being a young man at the start of the 20th century, Forster would have only been too aware of the trials of Oscar Wilde and would himself witness the arrest of friends and acquaintances over the decades.
His resentment over not being able to tell the stories he really wanted to tell and over having to work within the expectations of societal conventions lead to Forster stopping to write major works of fiction after A Passage to India (1924). That is, he did write another major novel, Maurice, but insisted that it should not be published until after his death as the story tells of the relationship between two men and he feared the repercussions. (Btw, Maurice apparently includes a game-keeper scene that may have inspired D.H. Lawrence - one of the few people who were aware of the manuscript - to mock it in Lady Chatterley's Lover).
Moffat explores Forster's diaries - including his "locked" diaries, which he also only allowed access after his death - in detail and we do get a clear picture of the anxieties and of the passions Forster had, and Moffat does well to connect Forster's diary entries with the lives of his friends, peers, and with perception of homosexuality in society through the decades.
However, this is also the main point where this book fell down for me. Moffat goes into a lot of detail. Salacious detail. Lots and lots of it. At times, I felt like whole chapters were focusing about who bedded whom more so than Forster's life and work. Rather than developing an argument, it felt like some of the descriptions merely served to provide a sensationalist hook.
I really should have liked this more than I did, but the meandering descriptions of relationships (not just Forster's but also of his friends and acquaintances) made me skim over quite a few paragraphs. There was little point to most of them.
The other criticism I have is with Moffat's writing style. It did not work for me. Her narrative sounded dramatised in a way that made the book read more like fiction than non-fiction and some of the descriptions, as a result of the narrations, did not sound factual even tho they may have been. This was not helped by the way that references were not clearly marked in the text. They were there, of course, but I should not have to check the reference section in the book to see if a certain line on a page is actually backed up with a source of research.
All in all, this was interesting, but I would not recommend the book without some hesitation.
Before judging my reading experience of this book based on my star rating, let me say this:
This was not a bad book and there are aspects of this biography that provide a valuable insight into Forster's life and work. However, this biography really follows Forster's life from one angle only, depending on what you expect from a biography, mileage on this may vary.
Moffat starts the book with an explanation of her approach, which in turn is based on something Christopher Isherwood said when looking at a stack of biographies about Forster:
"Of course all those books have got to be re-written," he said. "Unless you start with the fact that he was homosexual, nothing's any good."
That is, Moffat is quoting from an Isherwood biography by John Lehmann here, and whether this is a true account or was written as a dramatic embellishment, I could not say.
It does, however, go straight to the heart of Moffat's biography ... and also to one of the criticisms I have.
Moffat does an excellent job presenting Forster in the context of his sexuality, or more precisely his initial struggles with it and the immense pressure he felt of not being able to live openly for fear of persecution and, indeed, prosecution. Being a young man at the start of the 20th century, Forster would have only been too aware of the trials of Oscar Wilde and would himself witness the arrest of friends and acquaintances over the decades.
His resentment over not being able to tell the stories he really wanted to tell and over having to work within the expectations of societal conventions lead to Forster stopping to write major works of fiction after A Passage to India (1924). That is, he did write another major novel, Maurice, but insisted that it should not be published until after his death as the story tells of the relationship between two men and he feared the repercussions. (Btw, Maurice apparently includes a game-keeper scene that may have inspired D.H. Lawrence - one of the few people who were aware of the manuscript - to mock it in Lady Chatterley's Lover).
Moffat explores Forster's diaries - including his "locked" diaries, which he also only allowed access after his death - in detail and we do get a clear picture of the anxieties and of the passions Forster had, and Moffat does well to connect Forster's diary entries with the lives of his friends, peers, and with perception of homosexuality in society through the decades.
However, this is also the main point where this book fell down for me. Moffat goes into a lot of detail. Salacious detail. Lots and lots of it. At times, I felt like whole chapters were focusing about who bedded whom more so than Forster's life and work. Rather than developing an argument, it felt like some of the descriptions merely served to provide a sensationalist hook.
I really should have liked this more than I did, but the meandering descriptions of relationships (not just Forster's but also of his friends and acquaintances) made me skim over quite a few paragraphs. There was little point to most of them.
The other criticism I have is with Moffat's writing style. It did not work for me. Her narrative sounded dramatised in a way that made the book read more like fiction than non-fiction and some of the descriptions, as a result of the narrations, did not sound factual even tho they may have been. This was not helped by the way that references were not clearly marked in the text. They were there, of course, but I should not have to check the reference section in the book to see if a certain line on a page is actually backed up with a source of research.
All in all, this was interesting, but I would not recommend the book without some hesitation.
February 12, 2013
When researching her biography, Wendy Moffat tells us, Christopher Isherwood, a lifelong friend of E. M. Forster, advised her, "Unless you start with the fact that he was homosexual, nothing's any good at all." Moffat took that to heart. In doing so she gives us a different biography from what we might have expected. Forster was the novelist who wrote such critically-acclaimed and influential novels as Howard's End and A Passage to India. He was a don of Cambridge, lecturer, friend of Leonard and Virginia Woolf as well as many other intellectuals of the Bloomsbury group of artists and writers. He was also a homosexual who lived most of his life trying to live so that the fact wouldn't be revealed, though he relished the lifestyle and lived what he considered a fulfilling and satisfying life while defining himself as a homosexual, as did those who knew him.
That's the biography Moffat gives us. Not the biography of the novelist Forster and man of letters but the life of Forster the homosexual. The great unrecorded history, a phrase of his own, is the story of his sexual orientation and relationships. It's the story of how he lived as a homosexual in a society which, for his lifetime at least, prosecuted such behavior. It's an interesting story--Forster came to terms with his orientation quite early and never agonized over the fact of it. Moffat is even-handed with her material. There are no salacious details or juicy reveals we didn't know. And she writes well enough she can engagingly relate the stories of his relationships and those he loved as well as the many homosexual acquaintances he had. Moffat describes some of these friendships, those which influenced Forster directly or those which were with those prominent in society and the arts, in detail.
One small quibble: Moffat too frequently uses the word gay. To me the sexual and social lifestyle Forster lived was more correctly homosexual than the gay lifestyle we know today.
I enjoyed the book. Still, it wasn't the biography of Forster the writer I wanted. His novels are here, but not in any great detail, and without analysis or suggestions as to how their various elements and themes might relate to their author. Forster the writer was necessarily active in a rich company of authors and artists with whom he interacted. He socialized with the Woolfs and others of the Bloomsbury circle, for instance. He knew T. S. Eliot and D. H. Lawrence. But we're not told of his relations with them. The novel most often referred to is Maurice, the novel of homosexuality whose publication he wouldn't allow during his lifetime. The most detailed description of Forster at work is his writing the libretto for Billy Budd in collaboration with Benjamin Britten. As for Forster in life, what's important in Moffat's biography is his homosexuality. I think she probably records much of what has gone unrecorded until now. She has made it possible--necessary, even--to return to Forster's great novels as the focus of his life.
That's the biography Moffat gives us. Not the biography of the novelist Forster and man of letters but the life of Forster the homosexual. The great unrecorded history, a phrase of his own, is the story of his sexual orientation and relationships. It's the story of how he lived as a homosexual in a society which, for his lifetime at least, prosecuted such behavior. It's an interesting story--Forster came to terms with his orientation quite early and never agonized over the fact of it. Moffat is even-handed with her material. There are no salacious details or juicy reveals we didn't know. And she writes well enough she can engagingly relate the stories of his relationships and those he loved as well as the many homosexual acquaintances he had. Moffat describes some of these friendships, those which influenced Forster directly or those which were with those prominent in society and the arts, in detail.
One small quibble: Moffat too frequently uses the word gay. To me the sexual and social lifestyle Forster lived was more correctly homosexual than the gay lifestyle we know today.
I enjoyed the book. Still, it wasn't the biography of Forster the writer I wanted. His novels are here, but not in any great detail, and without analysis or suggestions as to how their various elements and themes might relate to their author. Forster the writer was necessarily active in a rich company of authors and artists with whom he interacted. He socialized with the Woolfs and others of the Bloomsbury circle, for instance. He knew T. S. Eliot and D. H. Lawrence. But we're not told of his relations with them. The novel most often referred to is Maurice, the novel of homosexuality whose publication he wouldn't allow during his lifetime. The most detailed description of Forster at work is his writing the libretto for Billy Budd in collaboration with Benjamin Britten. As for Forster in life, what's important in Moffat's biography is his homosexuality. I think she probably records much of what has gone unrecorded until now. She has made it possible--necessary, even--to return to Forster's great novels as the focus of his life.
February 25, 2011
E.M. Forster's fiction is superbly interesting, humorous, tragic at times. His life, seen through Moffat's gay lens, is similarly interesting, darkly funny, tragic but also uplifting. Mofat's book is an almost hagiography of a gay saint. Forster certainly (and rightly) comes out as a gay hero by the end of the book (he certainly knew every famous gay from 1900-1970). He more or less lived a an openly gay life, in a time when doing so meant losing everything. Moffat's doesn't really pull any punches -- it's risque book, but it was a risque life. He's a damn cool guy.
November 28, 2012
This book is just amazing. Wendy Moffat has done a terrific job, brilliantly researched and so sensitive to the interior life of the 20th century homo. Academic biography aside, Moffat creates a compelling polemic on the damage a narrow minded society imposes on gay men and women. "Yes, yes, I remember feeling that," I would say as the author parsed the homophobia that caused Forster so much suffering and distraction. Things are different now, I would tell Morgan, knowing he would be pleased with the progress we have made. On the other hand, Morgan's life-long task to protect his mother's sensibilities hit close to home, a reminder that some things remain resistant to change.
Best of all, unlike so much of today's cultural debate where gay criticism addresses the "choir," Moffat's biography will reach a wider audience, those seeking appreciation of 20th century Brit. Lit, and pushing academia a few more inches out of the closet.
Morgan, via Moffat, makes me proud to be an American, as least one lucky enough to be out in the 70s. Morgan’s wide-eyed appreciation of America’s ghetto culture, the openly gay enclaves of Greenwich Village and Santa Monica canyon, for example, registered for him as hope in the future. Imagine his bearing witness to both the Oscar Wilde trial and the Silverlake riots of 1967. Despite his long life, he was fortunately spared the epidemic of the 80s and 90s, exacerbated by this same “liberating” ghettoization he so admired.
Through this astute biography, I hope Moffat reaches a larger audience, be it academic, religious or Republican, with the awareness on the enormous cost culture pays to maintain policies of homophobia.
Best of all, unlike so much of today's cultural debate where gay criticism addresses the "choir," Moffat's biography will reach a wider audience, those seeking appreciation of 20th century Brit. Lit, and pushing academia a few more inches out of the closet.
Morgan, via Moffat, makes me proud to be an American, as least one lucky enough to be out in the 70s. Morgan’s wide-eyed appreciation of America’s ghetto culture, the openly gay enclaves of Greenwich Village and Santa Monica canyon, for example, registered for him as hope in the future. Imagine his bearing witness to both the Oscar Wilde trial and the Silverlake riots of 1967. Despite his long life, he was fortunately spared the epidemic of the 80s and 90s, exacerbated by this same “liberating” ghettoization he so admired.
Through this astute biography, I hope Moffat reaches a larger audience, be it academic, religious or Republican, with the awareness on the enormous cost culture pays to maintain policies of homophobia.
July 12, 2025
Though some might conceive of him as a consummate Edwardian, Forster's life spanned a rather mind-bogglingly eventful 90+ years -- from 16 years before Oscar Wilde's imprisonment until one year after Stonewall, as this book's prologue puts it -- and his network of acquaintances and influences was vast. Through his own reading as well as through his friendship with philosopher Edward Carpenter (an apostle and one-time paramour of Walt Whitman), Forster was, despite the strands of constitutional timidity that made him in one humorous scene condemn the moon landing, heavily influenced by Whitman's romanticism and optimism (one can pick up on this in, for example, Maurice). I was happy to read that Forster instantly appreciated the scale of his own achievement in Maurice thusly: "I do feel that I have created something absolutely new, even to the Greeks. Whitman anticipated me, but he didn’t really know what he was after, or only half-knew—shirked, even to himself, the statement."
At the same time, Forster also immediately recognized the greatness of contemporary poet Constantine Cavafy, for whose introduction to English-speaking audiences Forster was almost single-handedly responsible (and whose over-the-top eccentricities make him the subject of one of the most entertaining of many entertaining character sketches to appear in these pages). A parallel can be drawn between Maurice's dedication "To a happier year" and Cavafy's verse lines "A long time from now—in a more perfect world— / Some other made like me will appear / And, to be sure, he will act freely."
D.H. Lawrence comes across as just as obnoxious a person to know in this book as in Bertrand Russell's Autobiography, which feels weirdly vindicating. In contrast, Auden is one of the most lovable souls to walk across the stage here, as everywhere, and this sonnet he dedicated to Forster bears rereading in our era, too:
In his final years, Forster told one of his future biographers (William Plomer) two points he wished to be emphasized in a biography: first, that being gay "had worked" for him, and second, that all his closest friends had been ordinary people, not "eminent" ones.
At the same time, Forster also immediately recognized the greatness of contemporary poet Constantine Cavafy, for whose introduction to English-speaking audiences Forster was almost single-handedly responsible (and whose over-the-top eccentricities make him the subject of one of the most entertaining of many entertaining character sketches to appear in these pages). A parallel can be drawn between Maurice's dedication "To a happier year" and Cavafy's verse lines "A long time from now—in a more perfect world— / Some other made like me will appear / And, to be sure, he will act freely."
D.H. Lawrence comes across as just as obnoxious a person to know in this book as in Bertrand Russell's Autobiography, which feels weirdly vindicating. In contrast, Auden is one of the most lovable souls to walk across the stage here, as everywhere, and this sonnet he dedicated to Forster bears rereading in our era, too:
"Though Italy and King's are far away,
And Truth a subject only bombs discuss,
Our ears unfriendly, still you speak to us,
Insisting that the inner life can pay.
As we dash down the slope of hate with gladness,
You trip us up like an unnoticed stone,
And just when we are closeted with madness,
You interrupt us like the telephone.
Yes, we are Lucy, Turton, Philip: we
Wish international evil, are delighted
To join the jolly ranks of the benighted
Where reason is denied and love ignored,
But, as we swear our lie, Miss Avery
Comes out into the garden with a sword."
In his final years, Forster told one of his future biographers (William Plomer) two points he wished to be emphasized in a biography: first, that being gay "had worked" for him, and second, that all his closest friends had been ordinary people, not "eminent" ones.
October 13, 2020
so strange & dizzying to realise how much of the nineteenth & twentieth centuries morgan lived through ! so moving to see the networks of gay community, and now gay history, he formed & nurtured through his life ! & so difficult not to feel charmed by wendy moffat's vision of him, his lusts & laughter, his storminess & solemnity, his devoted friendships & endless letter-writing, his lonelinesses and losses !
August 18, 2022
Muito interessante e muito instrutivo.
Achei extraordinária a preocupação que E. M. Forster teve em deixar os seus pensamentos, as suas preocupações e as suas opiniões registadas para serem partilhadas após a sua morte assim como o seu romance "Maurice", na minha opinião, a sua mais importante obra.
- Publishable, but worth it?
- Claro que sim!
Mergulhar assim nos pensamentos e na vida de alguém nunca deixam de me surpreender.
A autora deixou um belíssimo trabalho!
Achei extraordinária a preocupação que E. M. Forster teve em deixar os seus pensamentos, as suas preocupações e as suas opiniões registadas para serem partilhadas após a sua morte assim como o seu romance "Maurice", na minha opinião, a sua mais importante obra.
- Publishable, but worth it?
- Claro que sim!
Mergulhar assim nos pensamentos e na vida de alguém nunca deixam de me surpreender.
A autora deixou um belíssimo trabalho!
June 21, 2023
This is in many ways a piece of the history of sexuality rather than a biography. Forster’s personal, sexual, and spiritual life takes the centre. Some people may find this vulgar or irrelevant, but for me, this approach was exactly to my tastes. I enjoy Forster’s writing, but I’m not overly interested in the details of his writing or publishing process. This book captures Forster’s inner life. Moffat almost seems to channel him.
July 9, 2022
Truly excellent. A biography like no other I've read.
June 24, 2018
Lost all respect for him, but wow, was this a salacious, scandalous read!
November 20, 2019
This is an excellent biography of E.M. Forster delving into his inner thoughts about his life and his homosexuality. Born on January 1, 1879, he died at age 91 in the summer of 1970. His one novel with a gay theme, Maurice, was written in 1914, but remained unpublished until his death. The saddest part was that he always felt himself unattractive and unworthy of love. It was only at age 37 that he finally experienced a physical relationship. He did have many friendships and acquaintances including connections to the Bloomsbury group. He spent an evening in New York in the company of Dr. Alfred Kinsey and was quite appreciative of Kinsey's studies.
May 17, 2022
“Forster travelled the world, achieved fame and riches, met and knew generations of great gay artists and writers, had numerous lovers, and yet to all intents and purposes remained a bachelor living quietly with his mother until she died in 1945, when he was 66.” –Ian Sansom
Wendy Moffat's A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life of E.M. Forster is the first biography to treat E.M. Forster's homosexuality as central to his life and work. I suspect Forster would have approved. After years of friendship with the younger Christopher Isherwood, Forster embraced the idea of "a posthumous biography 'briefly and brazenly' written." He told J.R. Ackerley, "I wish I could get [a biography] written about me after I die, but I should want everything told, everything." At the time he was writing a biography of his own, about his dear friend Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, and was forced to skip over Goldies's homosexuality.
A Great Unrecorded History begins with Isherwood and John Lehman, after Forster's death, discovering the short stories Forster wrote long after he publicly claimed that his creative writing well had dried up. The stories treated homosexuality too frankly to have been publishable within Forster’s lifetime. Isherwood and Lehman worked together to ensure that Forster's queer canon was published.
Over and over again Moffat comes back to the incredible community of queer men who supported Forster. As a result, much of Forster's work is available to us that would have likely otherwise been destroyed or lost. Forster himself considered burning his great gay romance Maurice, one of the first queer English stories not to end in tragedy, because he wasn’t sure of its quality. The book was dappled with gentle euphemisms—calling sex, for instance, “sharing.” When he first showed it to Isherwood, he asked with some hesitancy, “Does it date?” Moffat writes that Isherwood’s “response was the perfect blend of compassion and honesty.” He said, “Why shouldn’t it date?” and teared up. It was astonishing and admirable that Forster, who had been alone in his queerness for so long, had dared to write these words, to imagine a loving relationship between two men before such a thing had ever become a reality for himself.
Isherwood, just as many other readers would, found Maurice to be a valuable addition to the gay canon. Following Forster's death, Christopher Isherwood's precious copy of Maurice "was shepherded by hand, from Cambridge to London to New York to Chicago to Los Angeles, by trustworthy friends, all gay men." At the time, the cold war was being used to exacerbate homophobia, as queer men were believed to be inherently disloyal to their nations. The Comstock laws allowed people to be persecuted for mailing queer materials within the U.S., and in the U.K. gay men were being rounded up by sting operations, their personal documents often searched without a warrant.
Moffat’s biography is at times wide-sweeping, offering mini-biographies on other gay writers and artists, as well as painting a clear picture of the general era, from public school life to colonial anxieties. At other times it is perhaps too focused on Forster's sex life, at the loss of delving much into his works. But I think Moffat felt justified in being utterly dedicated to this topic that had for decades been neglected by other biographers. Perhaps in the future a more well-balanced biography can be written, but this one needed to come first.
Biographies are spiritually nourishing to me: They reframe my anxieties, put history into perspective, and soothe my fear of mortality. Biographies assure me that people can achieve wonderful things while being deeply flawed. Our culture has turned likability into a virtue, suggesting bland virtual popularity as a path to wealth and fulfillment. But this was not a route followed by, say, the anxious and chronically gassy E.B. White or the unsocial and fairly snobby Virginia Woolf. Their flaws are a comfort to me. Biographies contain the undiluted stuff of life.
This biography was thus a joy to read. There is something very hopeful about the trajectory of E.M. Forster’s sex life. After years of all-consuming lust and loneliness, he first had sex at 37. After some one night stands with soldiers, he fell in love with the Egyptian man Mohammed El Adl. He wrote to his friend, "Oh, Florence, what a mean, truncated life if this [relationship] had never happened." After tragically losing Mohammed, he would have another great love years later, and spend decades in an unusual relationship with his lover Bob Buckingham and Bob’s wife May, with whom Forster would eventually form a deep friendship.
Outside of Forster’s personal life, broader topics made this biography sing. Forster lived through two world wars. He lived through the Indian independence movement. To see him fighting against the same things we’re fighting against now both made me feel spiritually connected to the past—and comforted by that—as well as sad and disheartened. He fought against “foreign policy as machismo,” nationalism and anti-Semitism, homophobia and censorship, the undervaluing of freedom in times of peril, anti-science rhetoric, and imperial exceptionalism. He wrote angry op-eds about human rights abuses in India but was continually frustrated by feelings of powerlessness.
In a historical moment that gave me chills, a junior magistrate in India, Abu Saeed Mirza, told Forster, “It may be fifty or one hundred years but we shall throw you [English] out.” Forster was so moved by this he put the words into one of his character’s mouths in A Passage to India. He had no idea how right Mirza would be, though.
What surprises me is that, despite being called A Great Unrecorded History, so much of it is recorded. It is a bit of a wake-up call to read about the masses of letters everyone seemed to have written each other during the Edwardian era. E.M. Forster wrote down the truths of his life with remarkable candor, albeit often coded to get past the mail censors. (He describes his first sexual encounter, for example, as a "parting with Respectability.")
One of the scary but heartwarming moments of his life is when he sends affectionate letters from Egypt to his dear friend Sir Syed Ross Masood in India. The letters' tone aroused the suspicion of a censor in Bombay, who sent them to his superiors, calling Forster a "sexual pervert." A British official, a friend of one of Forster's friends, stepped in, dismissing the censor and saying that there was no evidence that Forster had acted on his urges. Those letters could have potentially cost Forster his job (which kept him in Egypt, where he eventually met the great love of his life) and even his freedom. But another man saved him.
(And how this episode nails home the absolute callousness of homophobia: That a gay man should be as inwardly lonely as it is possible for a human soul to be, and this was preferable in the eyes of the law to any simple companionship.)
One of the most disappointing parts of the biography was Forster's misogyny, particularly later in life. It seems the younger generation of gay men, such as A.R. Ackerley, prided themselves on being estranged from womankind, and Forster absorbed some of their more violent views. By this time he had stopped writing novels, but I am curious as to whether his life-like women characters would have changed into something less than if he had still been writing.
He wrote things like, "Women have got out of hand... Twenty years ago I thought, 'It's unpleasing to me but it won't go further' and spoke with false enthusiasm for women's rights. ... But it has gone further. This, I begin to see, is sex war..."
It is also sad that, while he had obvious, infinite love in his heart for gay men, he once told Virginia Woolf he found lesbians "disgusting: partly from convention, partly because he disliked that women should be independent from men." Moffat suggests Forster's misogyny is something that came to him later in life. However, I am currently reading Virginia Woolf's A Writer's Diary, and in 1919 she wrote that she and Forster ran into each other at the library and, "We shook hands very cordially; and yet I always feel him shrinking sensitively from me, as a woman, a clever woman, an up to date woman." How I would love to know what her precise thoughts were the moment Forster told her he found lesbians disgusting.
It is very interesting to me that queer men and women saw themselves as belonging to such separate communities during his time.
Moffat's biography was wonderfully interesting. I am now reading Forster's works chronologically. While Moffat may not have dived deeply into the content of Forster’s novels, I am able (perhaps wrongly) to see strands of autobiography in his stories. For example, Moffat writes that Forster, astonishingly, made it to the end of his grade school life without ever having a friend. It was Cambridge that transformed him and showed him true happiness, and the connections he made there would last a lifetime. In his second book, The Longest Journey, Forster writes,
"[Rickie] had crept cold and friendless and ignorant out of a great public school, preparing for a silent and solitary journey, and praying as a highest favour that he might be left alone. Cambridge had not answered his prayer. She had taken and soothed him, saying … his boyhood had been but a dusty corridor that led to the spacious halls of youth. In one year he had made many friends and learnt much."
It is impossible for me not to see the trajectory of Forster's own life in those sentences.
While reading, I realized that Forster lived long enough to have been filmed and recorded. Indeed you can see him talk and move on YouTube, and he sounds precisely as I imagined. It is also now impossible for me not to hear hidden references to his homosexuality even in this single clip.
“Anyone who’s cared to read my books will see what a high value I attach to personal relationships. And to tolerance. And to pleasure—pleasure one’s not supposed to talk about in public, however much one enjoys it privately.”
After reading the biography, his words sound even more suggestive than perhaps intended. So be it. I'm not sure Forster would object.
Forster’s life began cold and lonely, but once middle-age hit he was nourished by long and compassionate friendships and romances. While reading the biography—even the misogyny bits—I couldn’t help but think that I would be damn proud if someone could write a biography of me and if I could have so good a moral record as Forster seems to have. We all have our low points. He is remembered as the one who wrote, “Only connect,” but while writing that same book in which he wrote it, Howard’s End, he told his friend, “I think that most Indians, like most English, are shits, and I am not interested in whether they sympathize with one another or not.” He felt hopelessness; anger; disconnect; anguish. Still, he rose above his darkest thoughts and the politics that surrounded him. “Truly we live in strange times,” Forster told his lover Bob, during the blitzes, “and the only thing which is really real in them is love.”
Wendy Moffat's A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life of E.M. Forster is the first biography to treat E.M. Forster's homosexuality as central to his life and work. I suspect Forster would have approved. After years of friendship with the younger Christopher Isherwood, Forster embraced the idea of "a posthumous biography 'briefly and brazenly' written." He told J.R. Ackerley, "I wish I could get [a biography] written about me after I die, but I should want everything told, everything." At the time he was writing a biography of his own, about his dear friend Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, and was forced to skip over Goldies's homosexuality.
A Great Unrecorded History begins with Isherwood and John Lehman, after Forster's death, discovering the short stories Forster wrote long after he publicly claimed that his creative writing well had dried up. The stories treated homosexuality too frankly to have been publishable within Forster’s lifetime. Isherwood and Lehman worked together to ensure that Forster's queer canon was published.
Over and over again Moffat comes back to the incredible community of queer men who supported Forster. As a result, much of Forster's work is available to us that would have likely otherwise been destroyed or lost. Forster himself considered burning his great gay romance Maurice, one of the first queer English stories not to end in tragedy, because he wasn’t sure of its quality. The book was dappled with gentle euphemisms—calling sex, for instance, “sharing.” When he first showed it to Isherwood, he asked with some hesitancy, “Does it date?” Moffat writes that Isherwood’s “response was the perfect blend of compassion and honesty.” He said, “Why shouldn’t it date?” and teared up. It was astonishing and admirable that Forster, who had been alone in his queerness for so long, had dared to write these words, to imagine a loving relationship between two men before such a thing had ever become a reality for himself.
Isherwood, just as many other readers would, found Maurice to be a valuable addition to the gay canon. Following Forster's death, Christopher Isherwood's precious copy of Maurice "was shepherded by hand, from Cambridge to London to New York to Chicago to Los Angeles, by trustworthy friends, all gay men." At the time, the cold war was being used to exacerbate homophobia, as queer men were believed to be inherently disloyal to their nations. The Comstock laws allowed people to be persecuted for mailing queer materials within the U.S., and in the U.K. gay men were being rounded up by sting operations, their personal documents often searched without a warrant.
Moffat’s biography is at times wide-sweeping, offering mini-biographies on other gay writers and artists, as well as painting a clear picture of the general era, from public school life to colonial anxieties. At other times it is perhaps too focused on Forster's sex life, at the loss of delving much into his works. But I think Moffat felt justified in being utterly dedicated to this topic that had for decades been neglected by other biographers. Perhaps in the future a more well-balanced biography can be written, but this one needed to come first.
Biographies are spiritually nourishing to me: They reframe my anxieties, put history into perspective, and soothe my fear of mortality. Biographies assure me that people can achieve wonderful things while being deeply flawed. Our culture has turned likability into a virtue, suggesting bland virtual popularity as a path to wealth and fulfillment. But this was not a route followed by, say, the anxious and chronically gassy E.B. White or the unsocial and fairly snobby Virginia Woolf. Their flaws are a comfort to me. Biographies contain the undiluted stuff of life.
This biography was thus a joy to read. There is something very hopeful about the trajectory of E.M. Forster’s sex life. After years of all-consuming lust and loneliness, he first had sex at 37. After some one night stands with soldiers, he fell in love with the Egyptian man Mohammed El Adl. He wrote to his friend, "Oh, Florence, what a mean, truncated life if this [relationship] had never happened." After tragically losing Mohammed, he would have another great love years later, and spend decades in an unusual relationship with his lover Bob Buckingham and Bob’s wife May, with whom Forster would eventually form a deep friendship.
Outside of Forster’s personal life, broader topics made this biography sing. Forster lived through two world wars. He lived through the Indian independence movement. To see him fighting against the same things we’re fighting against now both made me feel spiritually connected to the past—and comforted by that—as well as sad and disheartened. He fought against “foreign policy as machismo,” nationalism and anti-Semitism, homophobia and censorship, the undervaluing of freedom in times of peril, anti-science rhetoric, and imperial exceptionalism. He wrote angry op-eds about human rights abuses in India but was continually frustrated by feelings of powerlessness.
In a historical moment that gave me chills, a junior magistrate in India, Abu Saeed Mirza, told Forster, “It may be fifty or one hundred years but we shall throw you [English] out.” Forster was so moved by this he put the words into one of his character’s mouths in A Passage to India. He had no idea how right Mirza would be, though.
What surprises me is that, despite being called A Great Unrecorded History, so much of it is recorded. It is a bit of a wake-up call to read about the masses of letters everyone seemed to have written each other during the Edwardian era. E.M. Forster wrote down the truths of his life with remarkable candor, albeit often coded to get past the mail censors. (He describes his first sexual encounter, for example, as a "parting with Respectability.")
One of the scary but heartwarming moments of his life is when he sends affectionate letters from Egypt to his dear friend Sir Syed Ross Masood in India. The letters' tone aroused the suspicion of a censor in Bombay, who sent them to his superiors, calling Forster a "sexual pervert." A British official, a friend of one of Forster's friends, stepped in, dismissing the censor and saying that there was no evidence that Forster had acted on his urges. Those letters could have potentially cost Forster his job (which kept him in Egypt, where he eventually met the great love of his life) and even his freedom. But another man saved him.
(And how this episode nails home the absolute callousness of homophobia: That a gay man should be as inwardly lonely as it is possible for a human soul to be, and this was preferable in the eyes of the law to any simple companionship.)
One of the most disappointing parts of the biography was Forster's misogyny, particularly later in life. It seems the younger generation of gay men, such as A.R. Ackerley, prided themselves on being estranged from womankind, and Forster absorbed some of their more violent views. By this time he had stopped writing novels, but I am curious as to whether his life-like women characters would have changed into something less than if he had still been writing.
He wrote things like, "Women have got out of hand... Twenty years ago I thought, 'It's unpleasing to me but it won't go further' and spoke with false enthusiasm for women's rights. ... But it has gone further. This, I begin to see, is sex war..."
It is also sad that, while he had obvious, infinite love in his heart for gay men, he once told Virginia Woolf he found lesbians "disgusting: partly from convention, partly because he disliked that women should be independent from men." Moffat suggests Forster's misogyny is something that came to him later in life. However, I am currently reading Virginia Woolf's A Writer's Diary, and in 1919 she wrote that she and Forster ran into each other at the library and, "We shook hands very cordially; and yet I always feel him shrinking sensitively from me, as a woman, a clever woman, an up to date woman." How I would love to know what her precise thoughts were the moment Forster told her he found lesbians disgusting.
It is very interesting to me that queer men and women saw themselves as belonging to such separate communities during his time.
Moffat's biography was wonderfully interesting. I am now reading Forster's works chronologically. While Moffat may not have dived deeply into the content of Forster’s novels, I am able (perhaps wrongly) to see strands of autobiography in his stories. For example, Moffat writes that Forster, astonishingly, made it to the end of his grade school life without ever having a friend. It was Cambridge that transformed him and showed him true happiness, and the connections he made there would last a lifetime. In his second book, The Longest Journey, Forster writes,
"[Rickie] had crept cold and friendless and ignorant out of a great public school, preparing for a silent and solitary journey, and praying as a highest favour that he might be left alone. Cambridge had not answered his prayer. She had taken and soothed him, saying … his boyhood had been but a dusty corridor that led to the spacious halls of youth. In one year he had made many friends and learnt much."
It is impossible for me not to see the trajectory of Forster's own life in those sentences.
While reading, I realized that Forster lived long enough to have been filmed and recorded. Indeed you can see him talk and move on YouTube, and he sounds precisely as I imagined. It is also now impossible for me not to hear hidden references to his homosexuality even in this single clip.
“Anyone who’s cared to read my books will see what a high value I attach to personal relationships. And to tolerance. And to pleasure—pleasure one’s not supposed to talk about in public, however much one enjoys it privately.”
After reading the biography, his words sound even more suggestive than perhaps intended. So be it. I'm not sure Forster would object.
Forster’s life began cold and lonely, but once middle-age hit he was nourished by long and compassionate friendships and romances. While reading the biography—even the misogyny bits—I couldn’t help but think that I would be damn proud if someone could write a biography of me and if I could have so good a moral record as Forster seems to have. We all have our low points. He is remembered as the one who wrote, “Only connect,” but while writing that same book in which he wrote it, Howard’s End, he told his friend, “I think that most Indians, like most English, are shits, and I am not interested in whether they sympathize with one another or not.” He felt hopelessness; anger; disconnect; anguish. Still, he rose above his darkest thoughts and the politics that surrounded him. “Truly we live in strange times,” Forster told his lover Bob, during the blitzes, “and the only thing which is really real in them is love.”
June 24, 2025
I took my time with this one. A masterpiece of a biography in my opinion, this explores how EM Forster’s identity as a gay man was not a peripheral or trivial detail, but formed and shaped and filtered his whole life’s experience. The research was beautifully done and the writing was a pleasure to read. Like most biographies, this one made clear that its subject was far from a perfect man, but in doing so increased my admiration for him.
October 31, 2014
Having read the PN Furbank biography of Forster many years ago I thought I wouldn't want/need to read another, but this was a very good read, focussing more on his life as a gay man than the Furbank (which was very honest and open even so). This one is quite a bit shorter, and sometimes it breezes along making it appear to be ignoring events, but the novels are all covered in good detail, and his most important relationships and friendships.
December 30, 2022
I really enjoyed this biography of one of my favourite writers, which delves into the 'unrecorded history' of EM Forster's private life as a homosexual man. Forster was 16 years old when Oscar Wilde was tried and imprisoned for homosexual acts, and 88 when homosexual sex (between men over 21 and in strict privacy) was decriminalised in England and Wales - which means that throughout the course of his long life he was forced to maintain a painful division between his public face as EM Forster, celebrated writer and novelist, and his private life as Morgan, the friend and lover of a wide circle of gay and bisexual men.
This necessity distressed him greatly - towards the end of his life he declared 'how annoyed I am with Society for wasting my time by making homosexuality criminal' - and he was determined that whatever the consequences to his literary reputation, the matter should be set straight after his death - not only with the publication of 'Maurice', the overtly homosexual novel that he'd hitherto considered 'unpublishable', but also by giving carte blanche to all his friends and former lovers to publish anything about him in their own memoirs that they wanted to.
Wendy Moffat's biography, published in one of the 'happier years' Forster hoped for in his dedication of 'Maurice', sets right the balance and heals the gulf between Morgan's public and private personae once and for all. Meticulously researched and full of wonderful quotes, anecdotes and friends' reminiscences, it brings Edward Morgan Forster before us - sometimes vulnerable, sometimes waspish, sometimes snobbish, sometimes misogynistic (particularly towards the wives of his bisexual lovers), but ultimately healed, whole, kind and loveable. A thoroughly satisfying read!
This necessity distressed him greatly - towards the end of his life he declared 'how annoyed I am with Society for wasting my time by making homosexuality criminal' - and he was determined that whatever the consequences to his literary reputation, the matter should be set straight after his death - not only with the publication of 'Maurice', the overtly homosexual novel that he'd hitherto considered 'unpublishable', but also by giving carte blanche to all his friends and former lovers to publish anything about him in their own memoirs that they wanted to.
Wendy Moffat's biography, published in one of the 'happier years' Forster hoped for in his dedication of 'Maurice', sets right the balance and heals the gulf between Morgan's public and private personae once and for all. Meticulously researched and full of wonderful quotes, anecdotes and friends' reminiscences, it brings Edward Morgan Forster before us - sometimes vulnerable, sometimes waspish, sometimes snobbish, sometimes misogynistic (particularly towards the wives of his bisexual lovers), but ultimately healed, whole, kind and loveable. A thoroughly satisfying read!
October 8, 2021
A marvelous life of the great writer filled with the small details giving us the background on all his various lovers and paramours and Forster's life long-lived in his mother's shadow. The six novels are dispatched early in the biography as the last of them was published in 1924 with Forster living long after that without writing another. This covers traveling, receiving honors, and coming out further than he had been able to in his youth. Many other big names including J.R. Ackerley, T.E. Lawrence, Glenway Wescott, William Plomer and others dance in and out of his story. Never a handsome individual, the writer seems to have been a man of great character and well-loved by many of his acquaintances. At this stage of my life, I find myself identifying with Forster a great deal and if you are of a certain age, you may also. In any case this is an enjoyable read and highly recommended.
May 21, 2023
Examining the life and works of E.M. Forster first and foremost through the lens of his homosexuality, so long hidden from the world at large until the posthumous publication of Forster's wonderful novel Maurice, Wendy Moffat has constructed an exceptional, intimate biography of one of the great writers of the 20th century. A wonderful book, and an excellent reminder that it's been far too long since I last read Maurice.
June 13, 2018
Indispensable reading for anyone who wants to know the author of Room with a View, Passage to India and Howards End.
May 30, 2013
Esta é a biografia "escondida" de E. M. Forster, em que a vida e a obra do grande autor são vistas (pela primeira vez?) à luz da sua homossexualidade. John Sutherland, na Literary Review, pergunta-se sobre esta biografia de Forster: «Será que quero mesmo saber isto tudo?» e prossegue: «Em minha opinião, este livro mancha a obra de Forster. Não podemos ficar gratos por isso. Mas Moffat (a autora da biografia) fez um trabalho detalhado, e esta é, de certa forma, uma "nova vida"». Uma nova vida que precisava ser contada, dizemos nós... e diz Forster, que deixou indicações detalhadas para evitar a destruição, após a sua morte, dos seus diários secretos, dos seus textos não publicados de caráter homossexual (o romance e vários contos), mencionando também que desejava que toda esta documentação pudesse ser consultado por quem o solicitasse.
Foi também o próprio Forster que nos indicou o quão central na sua vida e na sua escrita era a sua sexualidade: "Eu poderia ter sido um escritor mais famoso, se tivesse escrito mais, ou melhor, se tivesse publicado mais, mas a questão sexual impediu-me disso... [...] Aos 85 anos sinto-me tão irritado com a Sociedade por me ter obrigado a desperdiçar a vida ao condenar criminalmente a homossexualidade. Os subterfúgios, a auto-recriminação que poderia ter sido evitada."
E o trabalho de investigação de Moffat é fabuloso, a sua escrita é sempre rica mas fluente, o seu interesse no detalhe e a sua seleção de citações e apontamentos, de Forster ou dos seus amigos e correspondentes, é preciosa, como no pequeno poema de J.R Ackerley (que tocou fundo um Forster deprimido pela morte do seu amado Mohammed):
"Seeking my dead
Hearing him yet
Saying "Good-bye!"
Hearing his sigh,
Murmured so low,
"Ah, but I know...
You will forget."
ou nas citações de Forster sobre a sua filosofia de vida, como: "How does anything end? One should act as if things last", ou simplesmente, algumas pinceladas da sua escrita, como quando ele se deixa deslumbrar, numa praia deserta do Egito, aos 38 anos e ainda virgem, pela nudez de um egípcio: "I was bathing myself on the deserted beach and a man galloped up on a donkey, stripped, and tried to pull it into the water with him. The lines of a straining nude have always seemed academic to me up to now but hereafter I shall remember red light on them, and ripples like grey ostrich-feathers breaking on the sand."
Esta é, sem dúvida, uma obra monumental, excelentemente escrita e sumamente interessante, porque a vida de Forster o é.
Foi também o próprio Forster que nos indicou o quão central na sua vida e na sua escrita era a sua sexualidade: "Eu poderia ter sido um escritor mais famoso, se tivesse escrito mais, ou melhor, se tivesse publicado mais, mas a questão sexual impediu-me disso... [...] Aos 85 anos sinto-me tão irritado com a Sociedade por me ter obrigado a desperdiçar a vida ao condenar criminalmente a homossexualidade. Os subterfúgios, a auto-recriminação que poderia ter sido evitada."
E o trabalho de investigação de Moffat é fabuloso, a sua escrita é sempre rica mas fluente, o seu interesse no detalhe e a sua seleção de citações e apontamentos, de Forster ou dos seus amigos e correspondentes, é preciosa, como no pequeno poema de J.R Ackerley (que tocou fundo um Forster deprimido pela morte do seu amado Mohammed):
"Seeking my dead
Hearing him yet
Saying "Good-bye!"
Hearing his sigh,
Murmured so low,
"Ah, but I know...
You will forget."
ou nas citações de Forster sobre a sua filosofia de vida, como: "How does anything end? One should act as if things last", ou simplesmente, algumas pinceladas da sua escrita, como quando ele se deixa deslumbrar, numa praia deserta do Egito, aos 38 anos e ainda virgem, pela nudez de um egípcio: "I was bathing myself on the deserted beach and a man galloped up on a donkey, stripped, and tried to pull it into the water with him. The lines of a straining nude have always seemed academic to me up to now but hereafter I shall remember red light on them, and ripples like grey ostrich-feathers breaking on the sand."
Esta é, sem dúvida, uma obra monumental, excelentemente escrita e sumamente interessante, porque a vida de Forster o é.
August 19, 2016
A thorough and interesting account of Forster's long life, his quest for love and rather short career as a novelist.
His father died when he was a toddler, but there seems to have enough money in the family to allow Morgan and his mother, Lily, to lead a comfortable, if not opulent existence, for Morgan, public (ie private) school at Tonbridge, King's Cambridge (before student grants), no profession other than writing, and for Lily, two live in servants till her dying day.
And so, they lived, pretty much, disconnected from the harsh reality of politics, the Depression, poverty (except insomuch as unemployment and austerity provided the older Morgan with sexual possibilities). The author hasn't needed to paint a solid background of social and economic UK history of the 20th century, for which she must be grateful, given Morgan's wide circle of friends and acquaintances amongst the "glitterati".
It's a long, but never boring story and part of LGBT history. Morgan was 16 when Oscar Wilde was imprisoned, and he lived long enough to see the iniquitous Labouchere law overturned. No activist, Morgan preferred to stay in or near the closet, but Moffat seems to contrast "open minded" USA to repressive UK, which seems less than believable.
The book is written in American, so may seem to need a little translation of idioms and cultural references, but generally it's a good read.
His father died when he was a toddler, but there seems to have enough money in the family to allow Morgan and his mother, Lily, to lead a comfortable, if not opulent existence, for Morgan, public (ie private) school at Tonbridge, King's Cambridge (before student grants), no profession other than writing, and for Lily, two live in servants till her dying day.
And so, they lived, pretty much, disconnected from the harsh reality of politics, the Depression, poverty (except insomuch as unemployment and austerity provided the older Morgan with sexual possibilities). The author hasn't needed to paint a solid background of social and economic UK history of the 20th century, for which she must be grateful, given Morgan's wide circle of friends and acquaintances amongst the "glitterati".
It's a long, but never boring story and part of LGBT history. Morgan was 16 when Oscar Wilde was imprisoned, and he lived long enough to see the iniquitous Labouchere law overturned. No activist, Morgan preferred to stay in or near the closet, but Moffat seems to contrast "open minded" USA to repressive UK, which seems less than believable.
The book is written in American, so may seem to need a little translation of idioms and cultural references, but generally it's a good read.
December 29, 2012
Very good at the beginning, up until the 30%, then it became less focused, especially the period about the second New York trip. It became to centered on Forster's circle of friends than on his impression on America. There were some parts which made me very emotional, they were so delicate and moving, but there was also a detachment that I feel sometimes even the best biographer has to abandon. The last pages were beautiful. The book gave me an insight about Forster that I didn't have when I read his books. It didn't change an ounce my respect of him as a great novelist. It made me think that maybe he didn't accomplish everything he could, but he was very lucid in his choices. I went to a Catholic school and Forster wasn't in the school program - while D.H. Lawrence was, even if we were not allowed to borrow his books from the school library. I read Forster on my own a few years later, everything except Maurice, which I read only a few months ago. Without meaning to, I followed the path he had decided for his stories. Just knowing his books and not about his life, I read his books feeling that there was a narrator, but not an author. I wonder if he would have appreciated that...
July 22, 2018
Is art born out of hysteria? In other words: does sexual fulfillment kill the creative urges? In Forster's case, he wrote a handful of great novels while still in denial and in the closet (which seems to have been located in the home he shared with his domineering mom - obviously). After Forster came to terms with his homosexuality, he seems to have become a slightly creepy ageing queen who preyed on ostenstibly straight younger men from the lower social orders and replaced his creative urges with a quick wank behind the sheds - all the while staying firmly closeted, of course. It is sad that a man with such undeniable talent focused so much on what should have been a minor element of his life, even terminating his public writing career because he felt he couldn't write freely about his feelings. This biography focuses on what may indeed have been the single most important issue in Forster's life (and not unjustly so, since homosexuality was still a punishable offence for most of his life), but it makes for a rather thin story.
July 22, 2010
I thought this book was really good. Granted, it combined two of my favorite topics: literary biography and gay culture. I think Moffat did an excellent job of showing Forster's tenderness, empathy, intelligence and sincere search for true happiness. Also, I did not expect to be as inspired and touched by his personal story as I was. In the face of a society that was at best dismissive of his struggles and sexuality, Forster wrote movingly about having effectively no sexual experience until almost the age of 40, no real friends until at least his 20s, no parental and family support or understanding - and still keeping up the work of trying to understand people and find meaningful relationships. It really brought home his central message of "Only connect," at least for me. Moffat had the perfect mix of capturing somewhat salacious details of Forster's gay life and presenting a thorough, academic portrait of his entire life.
June 9, 2020
It’s been 50 years since Forster’s death in 1970. I’ve read both the P N Furbank and Nicola Beauman biographies, but Wendy Moffat begins with the fact that Forster was a homosexual. As a young man struggling with sexual identity and, later, as an established author being an active homosexual, Foster avoided offending his mother, tried to write novels which unsuccessfully describe relations between men and women, and tried to get homosexuality accepted into English life. As Moffat shows Forster’s monetary legacies made him free to write but his homosexuality prevented him from publishing what he wanted to write. Moffat presents the fullest description of Forster’s long and eventful life to date.
July 28, 2014
Este livro é o resultado de um tremendo trabalho de investigação e reconstituição documental da vida de E. M. Forster, através dos seus livros (com "Maurice" como ponto de partida) e vasta correspondência privada. Pergunto-me sobre o que poderá ter levado a autora a empreender tamanho exercício biográfico, mas depois de o ler, a estranheza dá lugar à gratidão. Descobrir e seguir, pela mão de Moffat, o percurso de vida de Forster é tão fascinante quanto revelador.
November 19, 2010
--- a beautiful, inspiring portrait of a great novelist and a kind, loving man with a talent for friendship . . JR Ackerly, Isherwood, DH Lawrence, Paul Cadmus, Benjamin Britten, Cavafy, and Christopher Isherwood counted among his many friends and acquaintances . . . an entertaining history of gay life and British literature over the course of the first half of the 20th Century.
October 25, 2010
Bit dry but does give quite a bit of insight as to why he was such a gifted writer.
February 26, 2019
I think I first heard about E.M.Forster on Virginia Woolf's diaries, then I watched the movies based on A Room with a View, Maurice, Howards End and A Passage to India, and only then started reading his books. And I like them immensely, in a couple of years I read the novels that had been adapted to movies and a few collections of short stories and essays. He's a wonderful writer; not as famous or influential as his contemporaries Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence or Christopher Isherwood, he is perfectly at the same level. My favourites are by far Howards End, A Passage to India and Pharos and Pharillon, I intend to read them again sometime soon. For many years, and still now, the words only connect are specially meaningful to me. And I remember my first time in Florence, when I thought to myself I'm in Santa Croce without a Baedecker and laughed silently.
Then, there's his life - I always liked biographies, particularly of people I admire or that interest me in some way. I knew the main facts of Forster's life for a long time, but recently I noticed this biography mentioned by someone whose opinion in books I value very much, so I ordered it, and I'm glad I did. Elegantly and affectionately written, some may say is to centered on his homosexuality, but in Forster's case, his homosexuality was the determinant fact about his life and his writing, according to his own words. I probably would have liked to read more about the conception and writing of his major novels, which is something that always interests me about a writer, but there's still just enough about that - I particularly liked the parts about the genesis of The Longest Journey (that I haven't read yet) and A Passage to India, and his discovery of and reaction to Cavafy, one of my favourite poets. There's plenty of gossip and details about his relationships and affairs - and who isn't pleased, even if guiltily, with gossip? - which are very informative about his character and personality, and also much information about his connections with many gay artists I didn't know, like the American Greenwich Village set of the late 1940s. In our present day identity-politics obsessed society, his lifelong attitudes regarding sex, race and class may be dismissively considered tibious or coward, but that's a very judgemental position, in my opinion. Not everybody is shaped to be an activist, and in his way, he actually contributed a lot to causes I cherish, like civilisation, tolerance and intellectual, personal and artistic freedom. Life is complicated, and there are many different ways to take your stand. And I think that through his art and his life, E.M. Forster contributed to make the world a better place, and what more can one wish from someone?
Then, there's his life - I always liked biographies, particularly of people I admire or that interest me in some way. I knew the main facts of Forster's life for a long time, but recently I noticed this biography mentioned by someone whose opinion in books I value very much, so I ordered it, and I'm glad I did. Elegantly and affectionately written, some may say is to centered on his homosexuality, but in Forster's case, his homosexuality was the determinant fact about his life and his writing, according to his own words. I probably would have liked to read more about the conception and writing of his major novels, which is something that always interests me about a writer, but there's still just enough about that - I particularly liked the parts about the genesis of The Longest Journey (that I haven't read yet) and A Passage to India, and his discovery of and reaction to Cavafy, one of my favourite poets. There's plenty of gossip and details about his relationships and affairs - and who isn't pleased, even if guiltily, with gossip? - which are very informative about his character and personality, and also much information about his connections with many gay artists I didn't know, like the American Greenwich Village set of the late 1940s. In our present day identity-politics obsessed society, his lifelong attitudes regarding sex, race and class may be dismissively considered tibious or coward, but that's a very judgemental position, in my opinion. Not everybody is shaped to be an activist, and in his way, he actually contributed a lot to causes I cherish, like civilisation, tolerance and intellectual, personal and artistic freedom. Life is complicated, and there are many different ways to take your stand. And I think that through his art and his life, E.M. Forster contributed to make the world a better place, and what more can one wish from someone?
October 2, 2020
From a very early age, E. M. Forster’s homosexuality was firmly known to him, and he calmly accepted it without alarm. He didn’t agonize over it, or seek to “correct” the aberration, or indeed, wonder what was “wrong” with him. Instead, the knowledge of his sexuality became a comfortable preoccupation which he sought to fulfill, but didn’t really succeed until beyond his mid-thirties. But more importantly, it seems as if his unfulfilled desires became the primary driving force behind his literary creativity.
Author Wendy Moffat promptly lays this down as the foundation of her biographical narrative. Rather than a pure chronology of life events—the traditional format for biography—she captures and integrates the relationship of Forster’s homosexuality into his creative life. Her telling of Forster’s discovery is compassionate, well-researched, and engaging. Despite his fairly undemonstrative behavior, Forster “preserved a vast archive of his private life—a history of gay experience he believed would find its audience in a happier time.” It could be argued, in fact, that Forster’s formal coming out only happened with the posthumous publication of his novel, Maurice, in 1970.
The majority of Forster’s half-a-dozen novels were written before the start of World War I in 1914, A Passage to India in 1924 being the exception. But it was while serving as a Red Cross volunteer during that war that Forster had his first, and probably most intense relationship—or “adventure” as he euphemistically called it. It was in Alexandria, Egypt with Mohammed el Adl and lasted about three years.
Forster enjoyed fame in his day. He traveled to, and had a great affection for, India, and also visited the United States twice for lecture tours. His path crossed those of a great many other notable writers, musicians, and artists, including Boris Pasternak, W. H. Auden, Benjamin Britten, Paul Cadmus, Ian Fleming, Christopher Isherwood, and Virginia Woolf.
Moffat’s scholarly biography is exhaustively researched and written with deep and sensitive insight. Reading other more traditionally-structured biographies of Forster would be insufficient to get a complete picture of a notable writer of the early twentieth century—they must be complemented by A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life of E. M. Forster.
Author Wendy Moffat promptly lays this down as the foundation of her biographical narrative. Rather than a pure chronology of life events—the traditional format for biography—she captures and integrates the relationship of Forster’s homosexuality into his creative life. Her telling of Forster’s discovery is compassionate, well-researched, and engaging. Despite his fairly undemonstrative behavior, Forster “preserved a vast archive of his private life—a history of gay experience he believed would find its audience in a happier time.” It could be argued, in fact, that Forster’s formal coming out only happened with the posthumous publication of his novel, Maurice, in 1970.
The majority of Forster’s half-a-dozen novels were written before the start of World War I in 1914, A Passage to India in 1924 being the exception. But it was while serving as a Red Cross volunteer during that war that Forster had his first, and probably most intense relationship—or “adventure” as he euphemistically called it. It was in Alexandria, Egypt with Mohammed el Adl and lasted about three years.
Forster enjoyed fame in his day. He traveled to, and had a great affection for, India, and also visited the United States twice for lecture tours. His path crossed those of a great many other notable writers, musicians, and artists, including Boris Pasternak, W. H. Auden, Benjamin Britten, Paul Cadmus, Ian Fleming, Christopher Isherwood, and Virginia Woolf.
Moffat’s scholarly biography is exhaustively researched and written with deep and sensitive insight. Reading other more traditionally-structured biographies of Forster would be insufficient to get a complete picture of a notable writer of the early twentieth century—they must be complemented by A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life of E. M. Forster.
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