E. M. Forster
Edward Morgan Forster was an English author. He is best known for his novels, particularly A Room with a View, Howards End and A Passage to India. He also wrote numerous short stories, essays, speeches and broadcasts, as well as biographies and pageant plays. His short story "The Machine Stops" is often viewed as the beginning of technological dystopian fiction. He also co-authored the libretto to Benjamin Britten's opera Billy Budd. Many of his novels examine class differences and hypocrisy. His views as a humanist are at the heart of his work.
Considered one of the most successful of the Edwardian era English novelists, he was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 22 separate years. He declined a knighthood in 1949, though he received the Order of Merit upon his 90th birthday. Forster was made a Member of the Order of the Companions of Honour in 1953, and in 1961 he was one of the first five authors named as a Companion of Literature by the Royal Society of Literature.
After attending Tonbridge School, Forster studied history and classics at King's College, Cambridge, where he met fellow future writers such as Lytton Strachey and Leonard Woolf. He then travelled throughout Europe before publishing his first novel, Where Angels Fear to Tread, in 1905. The last of his novels to be published, Maurice, is a tale of homosexual love in early 20th-century England. While completed in 1914, the novel was not published until 1971, the year after his death.
Many of his novels were posthumously adapted for cinema, including Merchant Ivory Productions of A Room with a View, Maurice and Howards End, critically acclaimed period dramas which featured lavish sets and esteemed British actors, including Helena Bonham Carter, Daniel Day-Lewis, Hugh Grant, Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson. Director David Lean filmed another well-received adaptation, A Passage to India, in 1984.
Early life
Forster, born at 6 Melcombe Place, Dorset Square, London NW1, which no longer stands, was the only child of the Anglo-Irish Alice Clara "Lily" and a Welsh architect, Edward Morgan Llewellyn Forster. He was registered as Henry Morgan Forster, but accidentally baptised Edward Morgan Forster. His father died of tuberculosis on 30 October 1880, before Forster's second birthday. His father's sisters helped his mother to raise him. The tension between his father's straight-laced, religious family and his doting mother influenced the themes of his work.File:Bs 03 rooks nest square.jpg|thumb|left|upright|Plaque and sundial at Rooks Nest in Stevenage, Hertfordshire, the childhood home remembered in Forster's novel Howards End.
In 1883, he and his mother moved to Rooks Nest, near Stevenage, Hertfordshire, where they lived until 1893. This was to serve as a model for the house Howards End in his novel of that name. It is listed Grade I on the National Heritage List for England for historic interest and literary associations. Forster had fond memories of his childhood at Rooks Nest. He continued to visit the house into the later 1940s, and he retained the furniture all his life.
Among Forster's ancestors were members of the Clapham Sect, a social reform group in the Church of England. Forster inherited £8,000 in trust from his paternal great-aunt Marianne Thornton, who died on 5 November 1887. This was enough to live on and enabled him to become a writer. He attended as a day boy Tonbridge School in Kent, where the school theatre has been named in his honour, although he is known to have been unhappy there.
At King's College, Cambridge in 1897–1901, he became a member of the discussion group known as the Apostles. They met in secret to discuss their work on philosophical and moral questions. Many of its members went on to constitute what came to be known as the Bloomsbury Group, of which Forster was a member in the 1910s and 1920s. There is a famous recreation of Forster's Cambridge at the beginning of The Longest Journey. The Schlegel sisters of Howards End are based to some degree on Vanessa and Virginia Stephen. Forster graduated with a BA with second-class honours in classics and history.
In 1903, Forster travelled in Greece and Italy out of interest in their classical heritage. He then sought a post in Germany, to learn the language, and spent several months in the summer of 1905 in Nassenheide, Pomerania, as a tutor to the children of the writer Elizabeth von Arnim. He wrote a short memoir of this experience, which was one of the happiest times in his life.
Career
In 1914, he visited Egypt, Germany and India with the classicist Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, by which time he had written all but one of his novels. As a conscientious objector in the First World War, Forster served as a Chief Searcher for the British Red Cross in Alexandria, Egypt.Forster spent a second spell in India in the early 1920s as private secretary to Tukojirao III, Maharajah of Dewas. The Hill of Devi is his non-fictional account of this period. Upon his return to England, Forster wrote A Passage to India. All six of his novels were completed in Weybridge, Surrey.
Forster was awarded a Benson Medal in 1937. In the 1930s and 1940s, Forster became a notable broadcaster on BBC Radio, and while George Orwell was the BBC India Section talks producer from 1941 to 1943, he commissioned from Forster a weekly book review. Forster was President of the National Council for Civil Liberties, as well as Cambridge Humanists from 1959 to his death. Forster became publicly associated with the British Humanist Association. In addition to his broadcasting, he advocated individual liberty and penal reform and opposed censorship by writing articles, sitting on committees and signing letters. He testified as a witness for the defence in the 1960 obscenity trial over the sexually explicit content in D.H. Lawrence's previously unpublished Lady Chatterley's Lover.
Forster was elected an honorary fellow of King's College in January 1946, and lived for the most part in the college, doing relatively little. In April 1947 he arrived in America for a three-month nationwide tour of public readings and sightseeing, returning to the East Coast in June. He declined a knighthood in 1949 and was made a Member of the Order of the Companions of Honour in 1953. At age 82, he wrote his last short story, Little Imber, a science fiction tale. According to his friend Richard Marquand, Forster was critical of American foreign policy in his latter years, which was one reason he refused offers to adapt his novels for the screen, as Forster felt such productions would involve American financing.
At 85 he went on a pilgrimage to the Wiltshire countryside that had inspired his favourite among his own novels, The Longest Journey, escorted by William Golding. In 1961, he was one of the first five authors named as a Companion of Literature by the Royal Society of Literature. In 1969, he was made a member of the Order of Merit on his 90th birthday.
Work
Novels
Forster had five novels published in his lifetime. Although Maurice was published shortly after his death, it had been written nearly sixty years earlier. His first novel, Where Angels Fear to Tread, tells of Lilia, a young English widow who falls in love with an Italian, and of the efforts of her bourgeois relatives to get her back from Monteriano. Philip Herriton's mission to retrieve her from Italy has features in common with that of Lambert Strether in Henry James's The Ambassadors. Forster discussed James' novel ironically and somewhat disapprovingly in his book Aspects of the Novel. Where Angels Fear to Tread was adapted as a 1991 film directed by Charles Sturridge, starring Helena Bonham Carter, Rupert Graves, Judy Davis and Helen Mirren.Next, Forster published The Longest Journey, an inverted Bildungsroman following the lame Rickie Elliott from Cambridge to a career as a struggling writer and then a post as a schoolmaster, married to an unappealing Agnes Pembroke. In a series of scenes on the Wiltshire hills, which introduce Rickie's wild half-brother Stephen Wonham, Forster attempts a kind of sublime related to those of Thomas Hardy and D. H. Lawrence.
File:III Palazzo Jennings Riccioli, Firenze, Italy.jpg|thumb|upright|Forster and his mother stayed at Pensione Simi, which was located in Palazzo Jennings Riccioli, Florence, in 1901. Forster took inspiration from this stay for the Pension Bertolini in A Room with a View.
Forster's third novel, A Room with a View, is his lightest and most optimistic. It was started in 1901, before any of his others, initially under the title Lucy. It explores young Lucy Honeychurch's trip to Italy with a cousin and the choice she must make between the free-thinking George Emerson and the repressed aesthete Cecil Vyse. George's father Mr Emerson quotes thinkers who influenced Forster, including Samuel Butler. It was adapted as a film of the same name in 1985 by the Merchant Ivory team, starring Helena Bonham Carter, Maggie Smith, Julian Sands, Denholm Elliott and Daniel Day-Lewis, and as a televised adaptation of the same name in 2007 by Andrew Davies.
Where Angels Fear to Tread and A Room with a View can be seen as Forster's Italian novels. Both include references to the famous Baedeker guidebooks and concern narrow-minded middle-class English tourists abroad. The books share themes with his short stories collected in The Celestial Omnibus and The Eternal Moment.
Howards End is an ambitious "condition-of-England" novel about various groups among the Edwardian middle classes, represented by the Schlegels, the Wilcoxes and the Basts. Howards End was adapted as a film in 1992 by the Merchant-Ivory team, starring Vanessa Redgrave, Emma Thompson, Anthony Hopkins, and Helena Bonham-Carter. Thompson won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance as Margaret Schlegel. It was also adapted as a miniseries in 2017. An opera libretto Howards End, America was created in 2016 by Claudia Stevens.
Forster's greatest success, A Passage to India takes as its subject the relations between East and West, seen through the lens of India in the later days of the British Raj. Forster connects personal relations with the politics of colonialism through the story of the Englishwoman Adela Quested, the Indian Dr. Aziz, and the question of what did or did not happen between them in the Marabar Caves. Forster makes special mention of the author Ahmed Ali and his Twilight in Delhi in a preface to its Everyman's Library Edition. The novel was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction. A Passage to India was adapted as a play in 1960, directed by Frank Hauser, and as a film in 1984, directed by David Lean, starring Alec Guinness, Judy Davis and Peggy Ashcroft, with the latter winning the 1985 Oscar for Best Supporting Actress.
Maurice, published posthumously, is a homosexual love story that also returns to matters familiar from Forster's first three novels, such as the suburbs of London in the English home counties, the experience of attending Cambridge, and the wild landscape of Wiltshire. The novel was controversial, given that Forster's homosexuality had not been publicly known or widely acknowledged. Today's critics continue to debate over the extent to which Forster's sexuality and personal activities influenced his writing. Maurice was adapted as a film in 1987 by the Merchant Ivory team. It starred James Wilby and Hugh Grant who played lovers and Rupert Graves, with Denholm Elliott, Simon Callow and Ben Kingsley in the supporting cast.
Early in his career, Forster attempted a historical novel about the Byzantine scholar Gemistus Pletho and the Italian condottiero Sigismondo de Malatesta, but was dissatisfied with the result and never published it, though he kept the manuscript and later showed it to Naomi Mitchison.