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.
As a child Betty Coles (later ET
) wrote plays (with very short scenes each demanding a new and elaborate setting) and stories. She said she always wanted to be a novelist.
Leclercq, Florence. Elizabeth Taylor. Twayne.
2
At twelve...
Intertextuality and Influence
Margaret Kennedy
Here Kennedy argues that entertainment and enjoyment are valuable aims for the novel. She maintains that the novelist is, in essence, a storyteller, but the storyteller-novelist has been excluded by a literary society that devalues...
Intertextuality and Influence
P. L. Travers
One of these essays (originally a lecture given in 1967 at the American Library of Congress) is entitled Only Connect, an instruction borrowed from E. M. Forster
which summed up PLT
's sense of...
Intertextuality and Influence
Mary Agnes Hamilton
Her title makes multiple allusion to disparate other texts. Its first four words are quoted from a poem of aspiration by Christina Rossetti
; the rest of it alludes to E. M. Forster
's semi-disillusioned...
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.
Early members of what VW
called Old Bloomsbury (to distinguish the original members of the group from later additions) included Virginia and Vanessa Stephen
, Leonard Woolf
, Clive Bell
, E. M. Forster
,...
Friends, Associates
Viola Meynell
VM
met Lawrence
through Ivy Low
. Enthusiastic about his writing, she offered to lend him her cottage and to do his typing. During his stay on the Meynells' property, Lawrence introduced Viola to Ottoline Morrell
The cultural production of members of Bloomsbury was prodigious, embracing the imaginative, critical, and political writing of Virginia and Leonard Woolf
, E. M. Forster
, and Lytton Strachey
, the economic theories of Maynard Keynes
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.
288-9
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
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.
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.
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
