E. M. Forster

Edward Morgan Forster (1 January 1879 – 7 June 1970) was an English author and one of the most successful English novelists of the Edwardian era. He is best known for the novels A Room with a View (1908), Howards End (1910), and A Passage to India (1924). He also wrote short stories, essays, speeches, broadcasts, biographies, and pageant plays. His short story “The Machine Stops” (1909) is often viewed as the beginning of technological dystopian fiction, and he co-authored the libretto for Benjamin Britten’s opera Billy Budd (1951).

Forster was born in London, the only child of Alice Clara “Lily” Forster and the Welsh architect Edward Morgan Llewellyn Forster. His father died of tuberculosis before Forster’s second birthday, and his father’s sisters helped his mother raise him. The tension between his father’s strict, religious family and his affectionate mother influenced the themes of his work. From 1883 to 1893, he and his mother lived at Rooks Nest near Stevenage, Hertfordshire, a house he remembered fondly and later used as a model for Howards End.

An inheritance from his paternal great-aunt Marianne Thornton gave Forster enough money to live on and made it possible for him to become a writer. He attended Tonbridge School, where he was unhappy, and then studied classics and history at King’s College, Cambridge, from 1897 to 1901. At Cambridge he joined the Apostles, a secret discussion group devoted to philosophical and moral questions. Many of its members later formed part of the Bloomsbury Group, with which Forster was associated in the 1910s and 1920s.

Travel also shaped his imagination. In 1903 he visited Greece and Italy, drawn by their classical heritage. In 1905 he spent several months in Nassenheide, Pomerania, as a tutor to the children of Elizabeth von Arnim, an experience he later remembered as one of the happiest periods of his life. He spent six months in India in 1912–1913, visiting his close friend Syed Ross Masood, through whom he first became familiar with Indian and Islamic culture. He began A Passage to India after returning home and later dedicated the book to Masood.

Forster’s novels often examine class differences and hypocrisy, with his humanist views at their center. During the First World War, as a conscientious objector, he served with the British Red Cross in Alexandria, Egypt, as a Chief Searcher for missing servicemen. In the 1930s and 1940s he became a notable BBC Radio broadcaster. He advocated individual liberty and penal reform, opposed censorship, served as President of the National Council for Civil Liberties, and was President of Cambridge Humanists from 1959 until his death. He declined a knighthood in 1949, became a Member of the Order of the Companions of Honour in 1953, and received the Order of Merit on his 90th birthday.

Forster completed all six of his novels in Weybridge, Surrey. His final published novel, Maurice, a tale of homosexual love in early 20th-century England, was completed in 1914 but not published until 1971, the year after his death. His books later reached new audiences through film adaptations, including David Lean’s A Passage to India (1984) and Merchant Ivory Productions’ A Room with a View (1985), Maurice (1987), and Howards End (1992). His words continue to matter because they are alert to private feeling, public pressure, social rank, and the moral choices people make in ordinary rooms.