E. M. Forster

Edward Morgan Forster (London, 1879 – Coventry, 1970), known as E. M. Forster, was an English novelist, essayist and librettist who wrote in the years between the Edwardian era and the interwar period. He was associated with the Bloomsbury Group, and his fiction turns again and again to class barriers and social hypocrisy, which is why it still reads as a sharp portrait of English society of his time.

Born on 1 January 1879 in London, he was the only child of a Welsh architect who died of tuberculosis in 1880, when Forster was not yet two. He grew up with his mother at Rooks Nest, a house in Hertfordshire that later served as the model for the house in Howards End. A legacy from his great-aunt Marianne Thornton gave him financial independence and made a writing career possible. He studied at Tonbridge and then at King's College, Cambridge, where he joined the Apostles, a discussion society that helped shape many of the friendships behind the Bloomsbury circle.

His first novel, Where Angels Fear to Tread, appeared in 1905. He travelled through Italy, Greece, Germany and India, and the last of these supplied the material for A Passage to India (1924), his best-known book, which explores the clash between British and Indian outlooks under colonial rule. During the First World War, as a conscientious objector, he worked for the Red Cross in Alexandria, where he met the Greek poet Constantine Cavafy. After the war he worked for the Labour newspaper the Daily Herald and took part in debates over censorship.

His style is realistic and often ironic. He examines the possibilities, and the limits, of contact between people from different classes, and he uses symbols such as the wych elm in Howards End to link characters with a past that reaches beyond social life. He also wrote short stories, essays and radio talks, and in the 1930s and 1940s he became a familiar voice on the BBC. Maurice, a story of love between men, was published in 1971, a year after his death, since its subject made publication impossible during his lifetime.

His reputation rests on those novels, which film later brought to a wide audience, above all through David Lean and Merchant Ivory. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature several times and was awarded the Order of Merit. His humanism, set out in the essay What I Believe, remains a key to reading his work.