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.
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...
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
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.
Textual Production
Anna Seward
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...
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had kept his Maurice unpublished.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
Textual Production
Ruth Padel
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...
Friends, Associates
E. Nesbit
EN
met E. M. Forster
after writing, the year after its publication, to congratulate him on A Room with a View.
Briggs, Julia. A Woman of Passion: The Life of E. Nesbit, 1858-1924. Hutchinson.
321
Reception
Hannah More
From her youth, HM
tended to be regarded as a formidable person. Those describing her reached for martial metaphors. During her lifetime her works aroused intense admiration and opposition. She was one of the twenty-four...
Intertextuality and Influence
Deborah Moggach
This novel deals rather briefly with the social and commercial success constructed for himself by Gordon Hammond (a self-made builder), then in more detail the flying apart of this apparently stable construction and the re-assemblage...
Literary responses
Naomi Mitchison
NM
was awarded the Palmes de l'Académie Française
for this novel in the year after publication.
Contemporary Authors: New Revision Series. Gale Research.
15: 333
Calder, Jenni. The Nine Lives of Naomi Mitchison. Virago.
73
Who’s Who. Adam and Charles Black.
She later wrote that this was my only official recognition from anywhere.
Mitchison, Naomi. You May Well Ask: A Memoir 1920-1940. Gollancz.
