The Longest Journey

Rickie Elliot, a sensitive and intelligent young man with an intense imagination and a certain amount of literary talent, sets out from Cambridge full of hopes to become a writer. But when his stories are not successful he decides instead to marry the beautiful but shallow Agnes, agreeing to abandon his writing and become a schoolmaster at a second-rate public school. Giving up his hopes and values for those of the conventional world, he sinks into a world of petty conformity and bitter disappointments.

Blending harsh realism with mystical images of nature, The Longest Journey was Forster’s favourite of his novels and also his most autobiographical, expressing his love for the vanishing English landscape. He described it as the novel ’I am most glad to have written’.

’Perhaps the most brilliant, the most dramatic, and the most passionate of his works’ Lionel Trilling