Biography: E.M. Forster

E.M. Forster was born in 1879 into a cultured upper-middle-class family, but his father, an archtect, died the following year. His early childhood was spent in the caring, protective company of three women: his mother, maternal grandmother and his aunt, Marianne Thorton, who was to exert the greatest influence on his life. She died when he was eight, leaving him a legacy of 8000 pounds for which he was forever grateful. It enabled him to lead a life of private means and become a writer. The Thortons were originally members of an influential group of metropolitan evangelicals active in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries called “The Clapham Sect”. E.M. Forster became very conscious of this ancestry which seems to have left its influence in his judgemental attitudes and moral seriousness.

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. Maurice (1971) and The Life to Come (1972), a collection of homosexual short stories, were published posthumously.