E. M. Forster

Edward Morgan Forster was born in London in 1879, the only child of an architect who died of tuberculosis when Forster was a year old. He was raised by his mother and a circle of great-aunts; one of them, Marianne Thornton, left him a legacy in 1887 that paid for his Cambridge education and gave him a small lifelong income — a piece of luck he was always frank about. He went to King's College, Cambridge in 1897, where he was elected to the Apostles, the secretive intellectual society whose members during his time included Lytton Strachey, John Maynard Keynes, and Leonard Woolf. The Apostles, and the Bloomsbury circle that grew partly out of them, shaped his sensibility for life: rationalist, secular, sceptical of conventional authority, attentive to personal relations as the medium through which moral life actually happens.

The four novels of his middle period appeared in quick succession: Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), The Longest Journey (1907), A Room with a View (1908), and Howards End (1910). The first and third pair the repressions of English middle-class life against the warmer disorder of Italy; both turn on the costs of refusing the body, the affections, the inconvenient person. Howards End — with its famous epigraph "Only connect" — is the most ambitious of the four, a novel about whether the cultured liberal Schlegel sisters can find common ground with the commercial Wilcox family, and whether England itself can hold its contradictions together. The answer is qualified at best.

A Passage to India (1924) followed after a fourteen-year gap, during which Forster had made two long visits to India, the second as secretary to the Maharajah of the small princely state of Dewas Senior. The novel — Adela Quested's accusation that Dr. Aziz assaulted her in the Marabar Caves, the trial that follows, the impossibility of British and Indian friendship under the conditions of empire — is the most politically searching of his books and the one that took the longest to write. He never published another novel.

The reason for the long silence after 1924 is, in retrospect, not mysterious. Forster was homosexual at a time when homosexual acts were criminal offences in Britain — the law was not changed until 1967 — and the conventional novel of relationships he had perfected required heterosexual machinery he was no longer interested in pretending to believe in. He had written Maurice, a novel about a love affair between two men with a deliberately happy ending, in 1913–14, and circulated the manuscript privately. He kept it back from publication for the rest of his life; it appeared in 1971, the year after his death, with a terminal note he had attached decades earlier: "Publishable, but worth it?"

He spent the second half of his life as essayist and broadcaster, returning to King's College as an honorary fellow in 1946 and living there until his death in 1970. Two Cheers for Democracy (1951), Aspects of the Novel (1927), and "What I Believe" are model statements of liberal humanism under pressure, including the much-quoted line about hoping he would have the guts to betray his country before his friend. The novels are smaller than they are sometimes claimed to be; they are also better.