E.M. Forster
1879–1970 · England
“Only connect!”
Peak-work percentile in the canon.
The lineage through E.M. Forster
Drew From(3)
who shaped E.M. Forster
via Middlemarch
- Howards End is the early-twentieth-century heir to Eliot's Middlemarch. Critics reach for the comparison first: the same authoritative narrator persuading you about how people work, the same panoramic ambition to take the measure of England.
- The novel's central crux — who rightfully inherits the house — runs on a suppressed deathbed bequest, the will-and-inheritance plot Eliot perfected; Forster makes the destroyed scrap of paper the moral hinge of the whole book.
- Where Eliot anatomized provincial life, Forster anatomizes the Edwardian classes; the country-house tradition the title invokes runs straight back through Eliot.
- Howards End owes its pastoral conscience to Hardy. Forster followed Hardy in trying to bring 'the poetic possibilities of the country into the novel'; the house and its land carry the same elegiac sense of a vanishing rural England that Hardy gave Wessex.
- Forster's own criticism shows the debt: in Aspects of the Novel he faulted Hardy for ordering characters 'to acquiesce' to plot but made Tess the exception, 'greater than destiny' — proof Hardy's tragedy was live for him.
- Howards End descends from Austen's novel of manners — the genre Forster updates here. He used the free indirect discourse and the ironic, norm-setting narrator he openly admired in Austen to expose the gap between his characters' self-image and their conduct.
- Critics call Forster the truest claimant to be Austen's spiritual heir; the contrasted-sisters pairing at the novel's moral center belongs to the Austen tradition this book carries forward.
Portraits
A high-resolution painted portrait of Forster by Edmund Nelson — the largest, cleanest likeness in the Commons set; good for a hero crop.
Edmund Nelson
A tightly cropped head-and-shoulders photograph of Forster — squared-off framing that reads well as an author avatar.
A clear photographic likeness of Forster from the Commons category — a straightforward alternate to the painted portraits.
Forster (left) with Mohammed el-Adl in Alexandria, c. 1917, from King's College, Cambridge — a dual portrait, so a crop would be needed to isolate Forster.
1917
Famous Quotes
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.
ature as he was, she might yet be able to help him to the building of the rainbow bridge that should connect the prose in us with the passion. Without it we are meaningless fragments, half monks, half beasts, unconnected arches that have never joined into a man.
ersonal relations are the important thing for ever and ever, and not this outer life of telegrams and anger.
felt for a moment that the whole Wilcox family was a fraud, just a wall of newspapers and motor-cars and golf-clubs, and that if it fell I should find nothing behind it but panic and emptiness.
About E.M. Forster
English novelist, essayist, and critic whose handful of books made him one of the defining humanists of early twentieth-century fiction. Educated at King's College, Cambridge, Forster fell in with the Apostles and the circle that became the Bloomsbury Group, absorbing a liberal, sceptical humanism that would run through everything he wrote. He published four novels in quick succession in the Edwardian years — Where Angels Fear to Tread, The Longest Journey, A Room with a View, and Howards End (1910) — comedies of manners with a hard moral edge, preoccupied with the gulfs between social classes, between England and the wider world, and between the head and the heart. His masterpiece, A Passage to India (1924), turned that vision on the British Raj. After it he published no more novels, partly because he could not write openly about homosexuality; Maurice, written in 1913–14, appeared only after his death in 1971. He spent his later decades as a critic — his Clark Lectures became Aspects of the Novel (1927) — and as an honorary fellow of King's. Died in 1970.