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.
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
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...
Intertextuality and Influence
A. S. Byatt
The painter Van Gogh
is a constant presence in this highly allusive novel, which takes Stephanie Potter, now Orton, through pregnancy and birth (while she tries to hold on to her former identity by reading...
Intertextuality and Influence
Anita Desai
AD
's work weaves together a wide range of cultural and literary references: the Mahabharata and the Bhagavadgîtâ, as well as such European authors as E. M. Forster
, T. S. Eliot
, Dickinson
Intertextuality and Influence
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
Heat and Dust presents a double plot: one set in the present, told in first-person narrative and in journals, and one set in 1923 (the April of which year saw an outbreak of Muslim-Hindu violence...
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...
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
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
Elizabeth Taylor
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.
