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Biography: E.M. Forster E.M.
Forster was born in 1879 into a cultured |
After
a happy early childhood, much of it spent at “Rooksnest” an
unpretentious country home near Stevenage in Hertfordshire and the
original “Howards End” in
his novel of that name, the family moved to Tonbridge so that the young
E.M. Forster could attend the Public School there as a day-boy.
Tonbridge is the original for “Sawston”, E.M. Forster’s fictional
home counties suburbia and symbol for an unrelenting small-minded
respectability satirised in his early novels. E.M. Forster was not happy
at Tonbridge and later attacked English Public Schools for producing
boys who had “undeveloped hearts”. Matters improved considerably
when he went to King’s College, Cambridge. He counted the years
1897-1901 spent as an undergraduate there as among the happiest in his
life. It was at Cambridge that he came under the influence of the moral
philosopher, G.E. Moore, who stressed the importance of personal
relationships and the power of art to influence life for the good. E.M.
Forster had been attracted by the classical ideals while at Cambridge.
He became a sceptical humanist agnostic who believed that the fulfilled
life lay in finding a balance between body and mind. He spent the next
few years travelling, mostly in the ancient classical world, writing and
teaching. It was through tutoring Latin for university entrance exams
that he met Syed Masood, the original for Aziz, 1906. A Passage to
India is dedicated to him and it was through him that E.M. Forster
developed his life-long interest in India. He visited Masood on his
visit to India in 1912-1913 and, encouraged by him, began his first
draft of the novel. E.M.
Forster published four novels in the first decade of the twentieth
century, Where Angels Fear to Tread
(1905), The
longest
Journey (1907), A Room with a View
( 1908), and Howards
End (1910). The grace and skill in which he attacked English
middle-class complacency and insularity in these novels has led to
frequent comparison with Jane Austen, but he also shows a yearning
aspiration for individual fulfilment that is all his own.. Howards
End is the most complex and
ambitious of these novels where E.M. forster sought to artivulate the
growing sense of national crisis in the years leading up to the First
World War. E.M. Forster spent much of the war years as a Red Cross worker in Egypt.
It was here, in Alexandria, that he had his first happy, sexual
relationship with Mohammed el Adl, an Egyptian tram-conductor, and began
to come to terms with his sexuality. Just before the war he had begun a
novel of homosexual love called Maurice, but this remainde unpublished during his lifetime.
After a second visit to India in 1921-1922, he finally completed and
published A
Passage to India
in 1924; it was to be his last novel. E.M. Forster developed a new career as journalist, essayist, broadcaster,
academic and public figure. In his private life he found happiness when
his meeting with a young policeman, Bob Buckingham, in 1929, led to a
lasting companionship. He continued to publish a wide variety of books
including a critical work, Aspects of the Novel (1927), two collections of essays, Abinger Harvest (1936)
and Two
Cheers for Democracy (1951),
and a book on his Indian travels called The Hill of Devi ((1953).
During and after the Second World War, he became a revered figure of
sanity and humane values who celebrated the virtues o the private life
during the fight against fascism and, later, totalitarian communism. In
1945 he was elected Honorary Fellow at King’s College, Cambridge where
he settled for the rest of his long life. He died in 1970. |