Edward Morgan Forster 1879-1970

Father died when he was an infant Raised by great-aunt and his mother Bullied at school because he was a day student at boarding school Studied at King’s College, Cambridge, where he became one of the founding members of the Bloomsbury Group (Woolf) Always critical of Victorian attitudes and British imperialism Refused to fight in WWI, served in International Red Cross in Egypt (pacifist views) Homosexual, but after the scandal involving Wilde kept his personal life private

„After graduation from Cambridge, Forster visited Greece and spent some time in Italy in 1901, and this experience influenced him permanently.” Norton Anthology, 2058

Pensione Simi, Florence (Pension Bertolini)

„Both Greek mythology and Italian Renaissance art opened up to him a world of vital exuberance, and most of his work is concerned with ways of discovering such a quality in personal relationships amid the complexities and distortions of modern life.” 2058

„Howards End probes the relationship between inward feeling and outward action, between the kinds of reality in which people live.” –Norton, 2059

„The most interesting, though not, perhaps, the most successful of the early novels is Howards End. It presents a perceptive anatomy of late-Edwardian England, already suffering from motor cars and traffic congestion and urban sprawl. The novel’s motto, ’Only connect”, represents Forster’s wistful aspiration for a union of hearts and minds between two aspects of the upper middle class: the cultivated and aesthetic, as represented by the Schlegel sisters, and the decision-makers, the people who get things done in the world of ’telegrams and anger,’ as represented by the men of the Wilcox family.” Oxford Illustrated History, 406

„Only connect. That was the whole of her sermon „Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.” Chapter 22 (read passage)

„Whenever E.M. Forster is discussed, the phrase “only connect” is sure to come up sooner or later. The epigraph to Howards End, the book he described with typical modesty as “my best novel and approaching a good novel,” seems to capture the leading idea of all his work—the moral importance of connection between individuals, across the barriers of race, class, and nation. What is not as frequently remembered is that, when Forster uses the phrase in Howards End, he is not actually talking about this kind of social connection, but about something more elusive and private—the difficulty of connecting our ordinary, conventional personalities with our transgressive erotic desires.” Adam Kirsch in his review of The Prose and the Passion by Frank Kermode

If Forster strikes us as quaint, in a way that his contemporaries Joyce and Woolf do not, it is not simply because of his formal conservatism, but because he shows us, in Frank Kermode’s words, “a world in which what may now seem fairly trivial sexual gestures carry a freight of irreversible significance.” As Kermode goes on to note in his brief but illuminating new study, “two stolen kisses are sufficient to sustain the plot of A Room with a View.” Adam Kirsch, review of Kermode’s biography of Forster The Prose and the Passion

„A Passage to India…the most searching and complex of all his explorations of the possibilities and limitations, the promises and pitfalls, of human relationships.” Norton Anthology, 2059

„A Passage to India is a triumph of aesthetic concentration and the balance of parts against the whole.” Oxford Illustrated History, 427