Forster is for me the only living novelist who can be read again and again and who, after each reading, gives me what few writers can give us after our first days of novel-reading, the sensation of having learned something.’īorn in 1879, Forster’s father died of tuberculosis the following year, and he was raised under the heavy influence of his mother and other female relations, who shaped his perception, and later characterisation, of women. I like what Lionel Trilling said in the first comprehensive study of Forster in 1943: ‘E. Forster’s work certainly required a little more cultural literacy than a penny dreadful, but he was certainly more readable than, say, TS Eliot. It’s been discussed before how the high Modernists, in their attempt to find the new, did so with the deliberate attempt to exclude the newly literate masses. It’s Forster’s way of calling out the philistines like the Wilcox family. As one modern scholar put it, Forster employs a ‘rather donnish technique of incorporating divergent sources’ to display his own broad education through the experiences and dialogue of his characters. I want to focus on two of his texts particularly, A Room with a View and Howards End, and how these incorporate issues of class and philosophy that are reflected in the use of travel, music, and property.

For producing a relatively small canon of literature, though, Forster is intimately tied to the Modernist movement. A sixth, Maurice, about a homosexual relationship, though written in 1913, was not published in 1971, a year after his death, because Forster did not want to publicise his sexual orientation. Edward Morgan Forster wrote only five published novels in his lifetime, all of them by the age of 45.

Edward morgan forster maurice