Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
E. M. Forster
-
Standard Name: Forster, E. M.
Used Form: Edward Morgan Forster
EMF
was a major novelist of the early twentieth century (despite his slender lifetime output of five novels). He was also a short-story writer, an influential critic of fiction, and the author of travel writing, surviving letters, and an opera libretto. He produced a pioneering text of post-colonialism in his final published novel, A Passage to India. After his death he was accorded the status of an activist for the acceptance of homosexual love between men, on the appearance of his polemical, posthumously-published novel Maurice.
RP
joined with five other poets in Machinery of Grace. A Tribute to Michael Donaghy
(1954-2004), published by the Poetry Society
in 2005. That same year she read some of her poems for the...
Intertextuality and Influence
Mary Renault
Homosexuals in British fiction had been portrayed mostly as sick, funny, or both since the Oscar Wilde
trials (1895). E. M. Forster
had kept his Maurice unpublished. Radclyffe Hall
had run into trouble. Virginia Woolf
E. M. Forster
presented twenty letters by AS
in 1939 to the Dr Johnson Birthplace Museum
in Lichfield, where they still remain.
Chisholm, Kate. “Bluestocking Feminism”. New Rambler, pp. 60-6.
60n1
AS
has some poems and letters included in volume four of...
Textual Production
Mary Martha Sherwood
MMS
contributed several titles to her Wellington publisher's undated collection Houlston
's Series of Tracts. The copy now at the University of Alberta
was once owned by E. M. Forster
, who pasted his bookplate into it.
Friends, Associates
Edith Sitwell
By 1919 ES
was also friendly with Arnold Bennett
and his wife Marguerite
. Wyndham Lewis
became a great friend, did many drawings of her, and demonstrated a sexual interest in her as well, which...
Textual Production
Zadie Smith
ZS
opened her novel On Beauty: One may as well begin with Jerome's e-mails to his father
Smith, Zadie. On Beauty. A Novel. Hamish Hamilton.
3
—in homage to Forster
, who wrote One may as well begin with Helen's letters to...
Textual Production
Zadie Smith
ZS
delivered the annual Orange Word Lecture at the Gielgud Theatre
in London, on E. M. Forster
's Ethical Style: Love, Failure and the Good in Fiction.
She was a shy, quiet girl and an overweight, anti-social adolescent, who used reading as an escape and refuge. She also loved...
Textual Features
Zadie Smith
Meanwhile Samad, under the pressure of menial work, low pay, constant low-level racist harrassment, a rebellious wife and insubordinate children, turns to religion. He nevertheless has an affair with one of his sons' teachers, and...
Textual Production
Zadie Smith
ZS
was thirty when this book appeared, as Forster
was at the publication of Howards End.
Kermode, Frank. “Here she is”. London Review of Books, pp. 13-14.
13-14
She later wrote of On Beauty: With a brazen ahistoricism I can't intellectually defend, around February...
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford.
ES
was well-known enough in Italy for copies of this book to be supplied to officers' mess-rooms of the Italian Army as a special compliment to the authoress.
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford.
It was also for sale in the...
Textual Production
Emily Spender
E. M. Forster
's Miss Lavish has an unpublished novel destroyed in an accident. It is not known if this was true of ES
as well.
Fictionalization
Emily Spender
E. M. Forster
used ES
as a source for Miss Lavish, a woman writer of romances who appears in A Room With a View, 1908. The basis of his portrait is the impression made...
