E. M. Forster

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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.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Education Q. D. Leavis
QDL defended her Cambridge dissertation, which was supervised by I. A. Richards , with E. M. Forster as external advisor.
MacKillop, Ian. F.R. Leavis: A Life in Criticism. Allen Lane, 1995.
130, 132
“Obituary: Mrs. Q.D. Leavis”. Times, p. 16.
16
Education Zadie Smith
ZS went to Malorees Junior School and then to Hampstead Comprehensive .
Tew, Philip. Zadie Smith. Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
27
She was a shy, quiet girl and an overweight, anti-social adolescent, who used reading as an escape and refuge. She also loved...
Family and Intimate relationships Virginia Woolf
Leonard Woolf was a close Cambridge friend of Virginia's brother Thoby Stephen and a member of the Apostles . A Jew, with family roots in London and Amsterdam, he grew up in London, first...
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...
Fictionalization Elizabeth von Arnim
EA inspired a number of creative portraits by her contemporaries during the earlier part of her career. Probably the best-known is the character of Mrs Failing in E. M. Forster 's novel The Longest Journey...
Fictionalization Emily Spender
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, Patricia Clements, and Isobel Grundy, editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford, 1990.
It was also for sale in 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, 1987.
321
Friends, Associates Sara Jeannette Duncan
E. M. Forster wrote in a letter that Mrs Cotes [Sara Jeanette Duncan] was clever and odd—nice to talk to alone, but at times the Social Manner descended like a pall.
Fowler, Marian. Redney: A Life of Sara Jeannette Duncan. Anansi, 1983.
288-9
Friends, Associates Sara Jeannette Duncan
SJD also met novelist E. M. Forster who came to India in 1912 two years after the publication of Howard's End.
Fowler, Marian. Redney: A Life of Sara Jeannette Duncan. Anansi, 1983.
286
Friends, Associates Elizabeth von Arnim
At Nassenheide, her home in Germany, EA employed the first of a series of Cambridge tutors for her children, who famously included future writers E. M. Forster and Hugh Walpole .
Usborne, Karen. "Elizabeth": The Author of Elizabeth and Her German Garden. Bodley Head, 1986.
96, 102, 120
Friends, Associates Elizabeth von Arnim
Of the tutors Charles Erskine Stuart became her admirer; E. M. Forster discussed novel-writing with her; and Hugh Walpole became her life-long friend. She invited Forster to Nassenheide on the recommendation of her nephew Sydney Waterlow
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...
Friends, Associates Ann Bridge
AB 's correspondents included Ka Arnold-Foster , John Betjeman , E. M. Forster , Margaret Haig Rhondda , Margaret Irwin , John Masefield , Naomi Mitchison , I. A. Richards , Vita Sackville-West , and...
Friends, Associates Amabel Williams-Ellis
AWE 's friends and associates included Edith Sitwell , whose poems she often published in The Spectator; Storm Jameson , a political mentor
Williams-Ellis, Amabel. All Stracheys Are Cousins. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1983.
128
as well as a creative advisor; Bertrand and Dora Russell
Friends, Associates Virginia Woolf
VW heard E. M. Forster 's talk on The Feminine Note in Literature at the Friday Club . His novel Howards End had appeared the previous October.
Lee, Hermione. Virginia Woolf. Chatto and Windus, 1996.
271

Timeline

After February 1917
Supporters of the Russian Revolution including Evelyn Sharp founded the 1917 Club to provide a venue for freely discussing the revolution without fear of attracting attention under the Defence of the Realm Act or Dora.
1920
Carrington painted her portrait E. M. Forster.
1924
Billy Budd, Foretopman, a novella written by Herman Melville in 1891, was published posthumously in a volume entitled Billy Budd, and Other Prose Pieces.
1928
Edwin Muir published The Structure of the Novel.
4 October 1928
The Young PEN Club , designed for beginning writers, held its inaugural meeting, chaired by John Galsworthy ; also present were E. M. Forster and the young Frances Parker (soon to be Bellerby) .
24 February 1934
The National Council for Civil Liberties was founded by journalist Ronald Kidd , who had witnessed the treatment of hunger marchers in London in November 1932.
21-25 June 1935
The First International Congress of Writers for the Defence of Culture (an anti-fascist event urging the responsibility of writers to their society) was held in Paris.
4 October 1951
E. M. Forster 's praise for the accomplishments of the BBC's Third Programme was published in The Listener.