E.M.Forster
The
photograph shows Forster as a young man. It was taken between 1920 and 1930.
Biography
FORSTER, Edward Morgan
([1 Jan.] 1879 - [7 June] 1970), was the only child of Edward Morgan Forster,
architect, who died in 188o, and of Alice
'Lily' Whichelo (1855-1945).
His boyhood was
dominated by women, among them his influential great-aunt and benefactress
Marianne Thornton, on her death in 1887 she left him £8,ooo
in trust. His happiest childhood years (1883-93) were spent at Rooksnest, Stevenage, a house he evokes in Howards
End. In 1893 he and his mother moved to Tonbridge, and Forster attended Tonbridge School, where he was deeply unhappy and
developed a lasting dislike of public-school values.
In 1897 he went to King's
College, Cambridge,
where he found congenial friends; the atmosphere of free intellectual
discussion, and a stress on the importance of personal relationships inspired
partly by the philosopher G. E. Moore (Principia Ethica) was to
have a profound influence on his work.
A year of travel in Italy with his mother and a cruise to Greece
followed, providin 434j99e g material for his early novels, which satirize the attitudes
of English tourists abroad, Baedeker in hand, clinging to English pensioni,
and suspicions of anything foreign. On his return from Greece he began to write
for the new Independent Review launched in 1903 by a group of Cambridge
friends; in 1904 it published his first short story 'The Story of a Panic'.
In 1905 he completed *Where
Angels Fear to Tread, which was published the same year, and spent some
months in Germany as tutor to the children of the Conntess *von Arnim In 19o6,
now established with his mother in Weybridge, he became tutor to Syed Ross
Masood, a striking and colonial Indian Muslim patriot, for whom Forster
developed an intense affection. *The Longest Journey appeared in 1907, A
Room with a View in 1908, and Howards End, which established Forster
as a writer of importance, in 1910. In 1911 he published a collection of short
stories, mostly pastoral and whimsical in tone and subject-matter, The
Celestial Omnibus.
In 1912-13 he visited India for some months, meeting Masood in Aligarh and traveling
with him. In 1913 another significant visit to the home of E. Carpenter (Fellow of King’s College in Cambridge,
curate to Forster, he supported socialism and progressive causes
–vegetarianism, homosexuality, labour - and revolt against middle-class
convention) near Chesterfield resulted
in his writing Maurice, a novel with a homosexual theme
which he circulated privately; it was published posthumously in 1971. It did
not as he had hoped open a new vein of creativity and the outbreak of war
further impeded his career. He worked for a while at the National Gallery then
went to Alexandria in 1915 for the Red Cross; his Alexandria: A History and
a Guide was published somewhat abortively in 1922 (almost the entire stock
was burned) and reprinted in revised form in 1938.
In 1921-22 he revisited India, working as
personal secretary for the maharajah of the native state of Dewas Senior for
several months. The completion of *A Passage to India (1922-4) which he
had begun before the war, was overshadowed by the death of his closest Egyptian
friend Mohammed, but when the novel appeared in June 1924 it was highly
acclaimed. Forster's fears that this would be his last novel proved correct,
and the remainder of his life was devoted to a wide range of literary
activities; over many years he took a firm stand against censorship, appearing
in 1960 as a witness for the defence in the trial of the publishers of *Lady
Chatterley's Lover.
In 1927 he delivered the
Clark lectures at Cambridge printed the same year as Aspects of the Novel;
they were a popular success, and King's offered him a 3-year-fellowship, and,
in 1946, an honorary fellowship and a permanent home.
In 1928 The Eternal
Moment, a volume of pre-1914 short stories, whimsical and dealing with the
supernatural appeared. He wrote two biographies, Goldsworthy Lowes Dickenson
(1934) and Marianne Thornton (1956). Abinger Harvest, essays
named after the village in Surrey in which Forster inherited a house on 1924,
appeared in 1936, Two Cheers for Democracy in 1951, The Hill of Devi,
a portrait of India through letters and commentary, in 1953.
He spent his last year
in King's College, and was awarded the OM in 1969, Maurice was followed
by another posthumous publication, The Life to Come (1972), a collection
of short stories, many with homosexual themes, including the tragic story 'The
Other Boat' written 1957-8.
(Text from Drabble, Margaret. The Oxford
Companion to English Literature. Oxford:
Oxford UP,
1998. © Margaret Drabble and Oxford
University Press 1985,
1995)
About the
author
British novelist,
essayist, and social and literary critic. His fame rests largely on his novels Howards End
(1910) and A Passage to India
(1924) and on a large body of criticism. On leaving Cambridge, Forster decided to devote his life
to writing. 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
favoured 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 an early novel, The Longest Journey (1907), he suggested that
cultivation of either in isolation is not enough, reliance on the earth alone
leading to a genial brutishness and exaggerated development of imagination
undermining the individual's sense of reality.
The same theme runs through Howards End, a more ambitious novel that brought
Forster his first major success. The novel is conceived in terms of an alliance
between the Schlegel sisters, Margaret and Helen, who embody the liberal
imagination at its best, and Ruth Wilcox, the owner of the house Howards End,
which has remained close to the earth for generations; spiritually they
recognize a kinship against the values of Henry Wilcox and his children, who
conceive life mainly in terms of commerce. In a symbolic ending, Margaret
Schlegel marries Henry Wilcox and brings him back, a broken man, to Howards
End, reestablishing there a link (however heavily threatened by the forces of
progress around it) between the imagination and the earth.
The resolution is a precarious one, and World War I was to undermine it still
further. Forster spent three wartime years in Alexandria,
doing civilian war work, and visited India twice, in 1912-13 and 1921.
When he returned to former themes in his post war novel A Passage to India, they presented themselves in a negative
form: against the vaster scale of India, in which the earth itself
seems alien, a resolution between it and the imagination could appear as almost
impossible to achieve. Only Adela Quested, the young girl who is most open to
experience, can glimpse their possible concord, and then only momentarily, in
the courtroom during the trial at which she is the central witness. Much of the
novel is devoted to less spectacular values: those of seriousness and
truthfulness (represented here by the administrator Fielding) and of an
outgoing and benevolent sensibility (embodied in the English visitor Mrs.
Moore). Neither Fielding nor Mrs. Moore is totally successful; neither totally
fails. The novel ends in an uneasy equilibrium. Immediate reconciliation
between Indians and British is ruled out, but the further possibilities
inherent in Adela's experience, along with the surrounding uncertainties, are
echoed in the ritual birth of the God of Love amid scenes of confusion at a
Hindu festival.
The values of truthfulness and kindness dominate Forster's later thinking. A
reconciliation of humanity to the earth and its own imagination may be the
ultimate ideal, but Forster sees it receding in a civilization devoting itself
more and more to technological progress. The values of common sense, goodwill,
and regard for the individual, on the other hand, can still be cultivated, and
these underlie Forster's later pleas for more liberal attitudes. During World
War II he acquired a position of particular respect as a man who had never been
seduced by totalitarianisms of any kind and whose belief in personal
relationships and the simple decencies seemed to embody some of the common
values behind the fight against Nazism and Fascism. In 1946 his old college
gave him an honorary fellowship, which enabled him to make his home in Cambridge and to keep in
communication with both old and young until his death.
*From Encyclopedia Britannica
Maurice
Set in the elegant
Edwardian world of Cambridge
undergraduate life, this story by a master novelist introduces us to Maurice
Hall when he is fourteen. We follow him through public school and Cambridge, and on into
his father's firm, Hill and Hall, Stock Brokers. In a highly structured
society, Maurice is a conventional young man in almost every way,
"stepping into the niche that England had prepared for him":
except that he is homosexual.
Written during 1913 and 1914, immediately after Howards End, and not published
until 1971, Maurice was ahead of its time in it theme and in its affirmation
that love between men can be happy. "Happiness," Forster wrote,
"is its keynote. . . . In Maurice I tried to create a character who was completely like myself or what I supposed myself to
be: someone handsome, healthy, bodily attractive, mentally torpid, not a bad
businessman and rather a snob. Into this mixture I dropped an ingredient that
puzzles him. wakes him up, torments him, and finally
saves him."
Maurice is a plea for emotional and sexual honesty, and it
criticises the repressive attitudes of British society. Aware that the
publication of that novel would cause a furore, Forster prepared it for
posthumous publication adding the line 'Publishable - but worth it?' to the
cover of the manuscript.
Plot
Maurice a
traditional bildungsroman, or novel of education about a young
middle class man searching for an own identity within a society which denies
his desire for love to a person of the same sex.
With the plot starting
just before the protagonist's 15th birthday, the reader follows
Maurice's life through public school, Cambridge
and his deceased father's stock broking firm, Hill and Hall. Forster omits the
childhood of - and by that the influences of society on - Maurice Hall. The
reader only learns about his early childhood, that he and his sisters Ada and Kitty were
brought up by their widowed mother.
Maurice is depicted as an ordinary man. That makes it easier for him to
disguise as 'normal' (i.e. heterosexual) person. Successively he experiences a
profound emotional and sexual awakening. His first homosexual relation to Clive
Durham at Cambridge
breaks up when Clive decides to marry. Later Maurice thinks about overcoming
his sexual desires but fails falling in love with Alec Scudder, the gamekeeper
on Clive's country estate. The novel ends happily. Forster wrote that although
the happy end was not plausible, he had not wanted to let the novel end
disastrous.
