Biography
Life
Born in London, the son of an architect, he was to have been named Henry but was baptised Edward by accident. Among his ancestors were members of the Clapham Sect and as a boy he inherited £8000 from his paternal aunt Marianne Thornton, daughter of the abolitionist Henry Thornton, which was enough to live on and enabled him to become a writer. He attended Tonbridge School in Kent as a day boy. At King’s College, Cambridge between 1897 and 1901, he became involved with the Apostles (formally named the Cambridge Conversazione Society), a discussion society. Many of its members went on to constitute what came to be known as the Bloomsbury Group, which Forster was a peripheral member of in the 1910s and 1920s. He later associated with writers such as Siegfried Sassoon, J. R. Ackerley, and Forrest Reid.
After leaving university he travelled on the continent with his mother and continued to live with her at Weybridge and Abinger Hammer in Surrey until her death in 1945. His early novels, set in England and Italy, were praised by reviewers but did not sell in large quantities. It was Howards End (1910) that made him famous.
He travelled in Egypt, Germany and India with classicist G.L. Dickinson in 1914. Doing war work for the Red Cross in Egypt, in the winter of 1916-17, he met in Ramleh a tram conductor, Mohammed el-Adl, a youth of seventeen with whom he fell in love and who was to become one of the principal inspirations for his literary work. Mohammed died of tuberculosis in Alexandria in spring of 1922. After this loss, Forster was driven to keep the memory of the youth alive, and attempted to do so in the form of a book-length letter, preserved at King’s College, Cambridge. The letter begins with a quote, “Good-night, my lad, for nought’s eternal; No league of ours, for sure.” and concludes with the acknowledgement that the task of thus resurrecting their love is impossible.
He spent a second spell in India in the early 1920s as the private secretary to the Maharajah of Dewas state (senior branch). The Hill of Devi is his non-fictional account of this trip. After returning from India he completed A Passage to India (1924) which became his most famous and widely-translated novel.
He later had a happy relationship with a constable in the London Metropolitan Police, Bob Buckingham, developing a friendship with Buckingham’s wife May and including the two in his circle which also included the writer and editor of The Listener J.R. Ackerley, the psychologist W.J.H. Sprott and, for a time, the composer Benjamin Britten.
After the death of his mother, Forster accepted an honorary fellowship at King’s College, Cambridge and lived for the most part in the college doing relatively little. He died in Coventry at the home of the Buckinghams.
Key themes
Forster’s views as a secular humanist are at the heart of his work, which often features characters attempting to understand each other, in the words of Forster’s famous epigraph, across social barriers. His humanist views are expressed in the non-fictional essay “What I Believe”.
Forster’s two most noted works, A Passage to India and Howards End, explore the irreconcilability of class differences. Although considered by some to have less serious literary weight, A Room with a View is also notable as his most widely read and accessible work, remaining popular for the near century since its original publication. His 1914 novel Maurice, published posthumously in 1971, explores the possibility of reconciling class differences as part of a homosexual relationship.
Sexuality is another key theme in Forster’s works and it has been argued that Forster’s writing can be characterized as progressing from heterosexual love to homosexual love. The foreword to Maurice expresses his struggle with his own homosexuality, while similar themes were explored in several volumes of homosexual-themed short stories. Forster’s explicitly homosexual writings, the novel Maurice and the short-story collection The Life to Come, were published shortly after his death and caused controversy.
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