The Readers Review: Literature from 1714 to 1910 discussion

BIOGRAPHY

E.M. Forster, in full Edward Morgan Forster, was born into an Anglo-Irish and Welsh family who lived at 6 Melcombe Place, Dorset Square, London, England on January 1, 1879. He was the only child of Alice Clara "Lily" (née Whichelo) and Edward Morgan Llewellyn Forster, an architect. His name was officially registered as Henry Morgan Forster, but at his baptism he was accidentally named Edward Morgan Forster. To distinguish him from his father, he was always called Morgan. His father died of tuberculosis on October 30, 1880, before Morgan's second birthday. In 1883, Forster and his mother moved to Rooksnest, near Stevenage, Hertfordshire where he was raised by his mother and paternal aunts. This house served as a model for Howards End, because he had fond memories of his childhood there. Among Forster's ancestors were members of the Clapham Sect, a social reform group within the Church of England.

In 1887 Forster inherited £8,000 (the equivalent of £802,290 as of 2015) from his paternal great-aunt Marianne Thornton (daughter of the abolitionist Henry Thornton), who died on November 5, 1887. The money was enough to live on and enabled him to become a writer. His education as a day student at Tonbridge School, Kent, was responsible for many of his later criticisms of the English public school system. The theater at the school has been named in his honor.

At King’s College, Cambridge, between 1897 and 1901, Forster enjoyed a sense of liberation. For the first time he was free to follow his own intellectual inclinations; and he gained a sense of the uniqueness of the individual, of the healthiness of moderate skepticism, and of the importance of Mediterranean civilization as a counterbalance to the more straitlaced attitudes of northern European countries. He became a member of a discussion society known as the Apostles (formally named the Cambridge Conversazione Society). They met in secret, and discussed their work on and about philosophical and moral questions. Many of its members went on to constitute what came to be known as the Bloomsbury Group, of which Forster was a peripheral member in the 1910s and 1920s.

After leaving university, Forster decided to devote his life to writing. He traveled in continental Europe with his mother. They moved to Weybridge, Surrey where he wrote all six of his novels. His first novels and short stories were redolent of an age that was shaking off the shackles of Victorianism. While adopting certain themes (the importance of women in their own right, for example) from earlier English novelists such as George Meredith, he broke with the elaborations and intricacies favored in the late 19th century and wrote in a freer, more colloquial style. From the first his novels included a strong strain of social comment, based on acute observation of middle-class life. There was also a deeper concern, however, a belief, associated with Forster’s interest in Mediterranean “paganism,” that, if men and women were to achieve a satisfactory life, they needed to keep contact with the earth and to cultivate their imaginations.

In 1914, he visited Egypt, Germany and India with the classicist Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, by which time he had written all but one of his novels. In the First World War, as a conscientious objector, Forster volunteered for the International Red Cross, and served in Alexandria, Egypt. He spent a second spell in India in the early 1920s as the private secretary to Tukojirao III, the Maharajah of Dewas. The Hill of Devi is his non-fictional account of this period. After returning to London from India, he completed his last novel, A Passage to India (1924), for which he won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction. He also edited Eliza Fay's (1756–1816) letters from India, in an edition first published in 1925.

In the 1930s and 1940s Forster became a successful broadcaster on BBC Radio and a public figure associated with the Union of Ethical Societies. In addition to being a broadcaster, he advocated individual liberty, penal reform, and opposed censorship, by writing articles, sitting on committees, and signing letters. His weekly book review during the war was commissioned by George Orwell, who was the talks producer at the Indian Section of the BBC from 1941 to 1943. He was awarded a Benson Medal in 1937. From 1925 until his mother's death at age 90 on March 11. 1945, Forster lived with her at West Hackhurst, Abinger Hammer, finally leaving on or around September 23, 1946. His London base was 26 Brunswick Square from 1930 to 1939, after which he rented 9 Arlington Park Mansions in Chiswick until at least 1961.

Forster was elected an honorary fellow of King's College, Cambridge, in January 1946, and lived for the most part in the college, doing relatively little. In April 1947 he arrived in America to begin a three-month nationwide tour of public readings and sightseeing, returning to the East Coast in June. He declined a knighthood in 1949 and was made a Companion of Honour in 1953. Aged 82 he wrote his last short story, Little Imber, a science fiction tale. At 85 he went on a pilgrimage to the Wiltshire countryside that had inspired his favorite novel The Longest Journey, escorted by William Golding. In 1969 he was made a member of the Order of Merit.

Forster was homosexual (open to his close friends, but not to the public) and a lifelong bachelor. He developed a long-term relationship with Bob Buckingham (1904–1975), a married policeman. Forster included Buckingham and his wife May in his circle, which included J. R. Ackerley, a writer and literary editor of The Listener, the psychologist W. J. H. Sprott and, for a time, the composer Benjamin Britten. Other writers with whom Forster associated included Christopher Isherwood, the poet Siegfried Sassoon, and the Belfast-based novelist Forrest Reid. Forster died of a stroke on June 7, 1970 at the age of 91, at the Buckinghams' home in Coventry where he had been living. His ashes, mingled with those of Buckingham, were later scattered in the rose garden of Coventry's crematorium, near Warwick University. (Taken from The Encyclopedia Britannica and wikipedia.)

ADDITIONAL BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

There is additional biographical information on E.M. Forster at The Literature Network and famousauthors.org.

AUTHOR'S BIBLIOGRAPHY

A list of E. M. Foster's writings are listed on wikipedia towards the bottom of the article.

Books about E.M. Forster are listed here.

FURTHER READING

ARTICLES
EM Forster: 'But for Masood, I might never have gone to India'

Julian Barnes: I was wrong about EM Forster

The Novels of E. M. Forster by Virginia Woolf

VIDEO
E M Forster Talks About Writing Novels - 'Only Connect'n on youtube

LOOKING TO BUY A HOUSE?
A room with a view! Childhood home of EM Forster and inspiration for the country house in his novel Howards End goes on sale for £1.5m

What a fascinating life—I didn’t know half of that about him! Thank you for posting it. I’d never heard he had an interest in Europe’s pagan roots. Makes me all the more eager to read A Room with a View. And he lived for a time at Abinger Hammer! A neighborhood I’m currently writing about. Too bad he’s too late to be included.

The Wikipedia entry also indicates Forester was nominated for the Nobel Prize sixteen different years. (I forget the exact rules, but after so many years, the Nobel committee in now releasing records of nominations, even if never selected, at least in the area of literature.)

I've read this book, When Angels Fear to Tread, A Passage to India and Howards End, all after seeing the films. Can you imagine, he began this book in 1901, in a world very different from ours, and lived till 1970, our own time. I wonder what he thought of 1970 society.

Rochelle wrote: "I've read this book, When Angels Fear to Tread, A Passage to India and Howards End, all after seeing the films. Can you imagine, he began this book in 1901, in a world very different from ours, and..."

I knew my great mother who died in 1975. She swore we would not see as many changes as she had. From kerosene lamps to men on the moon. There are times I wonder what she would think about now.

We're lucky that Forster lived into our own time. His commentary on A Passage to India
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTI4D...

He's someone I would have liked to know, a gentleman in the old sense.

Https://www.Forreadingaddicts.co.uk has ten quotes by a Forester.

Rochelle wrote: "We're lucky that Forster lived into our own time. His commentary on A Passage to India
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTI4D...

He's someone I would have liked to know, a gentleman in the old s..."

Agree 100%

Rochelle wrote: "I've read this book, When Angels Fear to Tread, A Passage to India and Howards End, all after seeing the films. Can you imagine, he began this book in 1901, in a world very different from ours, and..."

I too watched all three movies first and then read the books :)
They were done well too

And yes how amazing he lived till the 70s, what kind of writing would he have come up wit then...
And what a pioneer in liberal thinking.

Thanks Deborah for all the background info on the author and the novel

How beautiful to have had a love story for himself in the end and that last gesture, to have their ashes scattered in a garden, an eternity together then! Lilacs :)

Bumping this up for our April book