E. M. Forster: Life Before Bloomsbury
“But when I die and they write my life they can say everything.”
I was impressed by his complete modesty … There is something too simple about him – for a writer, perhaps, mystic, silly, but with a child’s insight; oh yes, & something manly and definite.1
Virginia Woolf
Edward Morgan Forster, E. M. Forster to the public and Morgan to his friends was a writer, essayist, and social and literary critic, and was nominated for the literary Nobel Prize in twenty separate years.
Despite retiring from writing novels when he was just forty-five, he is still best known for his six books: Where Angels Fear to Tread, The Longest Journey, A Room With A View, Howards End, A Passage to India, and Maurice. It is these novels, exploring themes such as class differences, social hypocrisy and homosexuality, that have made him one of England’s most beloved and successful Edwardian-era novelists.