by Sam Alexander Abinger Harvest (1936) collects essays, reviews, poetry and a pageant play, written by E.M. Forster between the years 1903-1935. The volume is ordered not chronologically but “by subject,” and Forster groups the selections under five headings: “The Present,” “Books,” “The Past,” “The East,” and “The Abinger Pageant”—the play that gives the volume… Continue Reading Abinger Harvest
Category: E.M. Forster
A Passage to India
by Pericles Lewis The last novel E.M. Forster wrote, A Passage to India (1924), ends with the question of whether two men can overcome social divisions, not of class (as in Maurice) but of race. Here, the hoped-for destruction of the barriers of prejudice is deferred. At the end of the novel, the Englishman Fielding… Continue Reading A Passage to India
Alexandria: A History and a Guide
by Samuel Cross Published in 1922, E. M. Forster’s Alexandria: A History and a Guide was one of two books, along with Pharos and Pharillon, in which Forster sought to describe the city in which he was stationed as a Red Cross volunteer during World War I. Forster had originally traveled to Alexandria with idealistic… Continue Reading Alexandria: A History and a Guide
Maurice
E.M. Forster’s novel Maurice, written in 1913 but published only posthumously in 1971, tells the story of a homosexual love affair, in the context of a society (like that of Howards End) riven by class conflict. It ends with the title character escaping from civilization and going to live in the country with his working-class… Continue Reading Maurice
Howards End
The major novel of E.M. Forster’s early period, Howards End (1910), describes the encounter between the commercial Wilcox family and the intellectual Schlegels, representatives of the competing attitudes of the Edwardian upper classes towards modernity and social convention. The victims of their encounter, the impoverished Leonard and Jackie Bast, are both crushed under the wheel… Continue Reading Howards End
Where Angels Fear to Tread
by Sam Alexander Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905) is E.M. Forster’s first novel. With its action split between England and Italy, the novel raises questions about national character the possibility of personal connection across social differences that would occupy Forster throughout his career. Like Lucia di Lammermoor, the tragic opera that becomes raucously entertaining… Continue Reading Where Angels Fear to Tread
E.M. Forster
Biography by Anthony Domestico E.M. Forster (1879-1970) is difficult writer to classify. An Edwardian modernist, he criticized Victorian middle class mores in formally traditional novels; a writer who idealized connection and sincerity above all else, he kept his own homosexuality hidden from view but defended D.H. Lawrence’s sexually daring Lady Chatterley’s Lover from obscenity charges.… Continue Reading E.M. Forster