E. M. Forster: A Biography

E. M. Forster was one of the greatest novelists of the twentieth century, author of such acclaimed and much-loved books as A Room with a View, Howards End and A Passage to India. Yet in many ways his life has remained an enigma. Homosexual, deeply inhibited, a man who lived with his mother from the time he was born until her death when he was sixty-six, Forster nevertheless created a fictional world of abiding richness and fascination. It is this paradoxical relationship between Forster’s life and his writings that Nicola Beauman explores here.
Born in 1879, Forster wrote his first novel in his mid-twenties, and by the time he was thirty-five had completed four more. Yet after he published his final novel ten years later, he never wrote another. Why Forster abandoned fiction, where the roots of his novels actually lay (among other discoveries, Nicola Beauman shows that Maurice, his posthumously published novel about homosexual love, was based on real events and real people), just how his experiences in India and Egypt and the suburbs of London shaped and colored his work – such are the issues that E. M. Forster brilliantly illuminates. It evokes Forster’s lifelong obsession with houses, families and inherited traditions, and investigates the effects of his mother’s stultifying grasp. And above all, it sympathetically examines, for the first time, the emotional and sexual frustrations that oppressed him well into middle age, and what they meant to his writing.