Edward Morgan Forster 1879 1970 Born in 1879

Edward Morgan Forster 1879 -1970

• • Born in 1879 in central London Father died when he was an infant Raised by great-aunt and his mother Bullied at school because he was a day student at boarding school Studied at King’s College, Cambridge, where he became one of the founding members of the Bloomsbury Group (Woolf) Always critical of Victorian attitudes and British imperialism Refused to fight in WWI, served in International Red Cross in Egypt (pacifist views) Homosexual, but after the scandal involving Wilde kept his personal life private

„After graduation from Cambridge, Forster visited Greece and spent some time in Italy in 1901, and this experience influenced him permanently. ” Norton Anthology

„Both Greek mythology and Italian Renaissance art opened up to him a world of vital exuberance, and most of his work is concerned with ways of discovering such a quality in personal relationships amid the complexities and distortions of modern life. ” 2058

Pensione Simi, Florence (Pension Bertolini)

A Room with a View (1908) Characters: Lucy Honeychurch and her older cousin Charlotte Bartlett George Emerson and his father, Mr. Emerson Miss Lavish, a writer of romance novels Mr. Beebe, a vicar Cecil Vyse, Lucy’s suitor Freddy Honeychurch Mrs. Honeychurch, Lucy and Freddy’s mother

„Two Italians by the Loggia had been bickering about a debt. ‚Cinque lire, ’ they had cried, ‚cinque lire!’ They sparred at each other, and one of them was hit lightly upon the chest. He frowned; he bent towards Lucy with a look of interest, as if he had an important message for her. He opened his lips to deliver it, and a stream of red came out between them and trickled down his unshaven chin. That was all. A crowd rose out of the dusk. It hid this extraordinary man from her, and bore him away to the fountain. Mr. George Emerson happened to be a few paces away, looking at her across the spot where the man had been. How very odd! Across something. Even as she caught sight of him he grew dim; the palace itself grew dim, swayed above her, fell on to her softly, slowly noiselessly, and the sky fell with it. She thought: ‚Oh, what have I done? ” –from Chapter 4

„He whispered: ‚Is it this? Is this possible? I’ll put a marvel to you. That your cousin has always hoped. That from the very first moment we met, she hoped, far down in her mind, that we should be like this—of course, very far down. That she fought us on the surface, and yet she hoped. I can’t explain her any other way. Can you? . . . ’It is impossible, ’ murmured Lucy, and then, remembering the experiences of her own heart, she said: ‚No—it is just possible. ’ Youth enwrapped them; the song of Phaethon announced passion requited, love attained. But they were conscious of a love more mysterious than this. The song died away; they heard the river, bearing down the snows of winter into the Mediterranean. ” from Chapter 20

Howards End (1910) „Howards End probes the relationship between inward feeling and outward action, between the kinds of reality in which people live. ” –Norton, 2059

Characters: The Wilcox family Henry, Ruth, Charles, Paul, Evie The Schlegels Margaret, Helen and Tibi The Basts Leonard, Jacky

„The most interesting, though not, perhaps, the most successful of the early novels is Howards End. It presents a perceptive anatomy of late. Edwardian England, already suffering from motor cars and traffic congestion and urban sprawl. The novel’s motto, ’Only connect”, represents Forster’s wistful aspiration for a union of hearts and minds between two aspects of the upper middle class: the cultivated and aesthetic, as represented by the Schlegel sisters, and the decisionmakers, the people who get things done in the world of ’telegrams and anger, ’ as represented by the men of the Wilcox family. ” Oxford Illustrated History, 406

From Chapter 22 „Margaret greeted her lord with peculiar tenderness on the morrow. Mature as he was, she might yet be able to help him to the building of the rainbow bridge that should connect the prose in us with the passion. Without it we are meaningless fragments, half monks, half beasts, unconnected arches that have never joined into a man. With it love is born, and alights on the highest curve, glowing against the grey, sober against the fire. Happy the man who sees from either aspect the glory of these outspread wings. The roads of his soul lie clear, and he and his friends shall find easy-going

It was hard-going in the roads of Mr. Wilcox's soul. From boyhood he had neglected them. "I am not a fellow who bothers about my own inside. " Outwardly he was cheerful, reliable, and brave; but within, all had reverted to chaos, ruled, so far as it was ruled at all, by an incomplete asceticism. Whether as boy, husband, or widower, he had always the sneaking belief that bodily passion is bad, a belief that is desirable only when held passionately. Religion had confirmed him. The words that were read aloud on Sunday to him and to other respectable men were the words that had once kindled the souls of St. Catharine and St. Francis into a white-hot hatred of the carnal. He could-not be as the saints and love the Infinite with a seraphic ardour, but he could be a little ashamed of loving a wife. "Amabat, amare timebat. " And it was here that Margaret hoped to help him.

It did not seem so difficult. She need trouble him with no gift of her own. She would only point out the salvation that was latent in his own soul, and in the soul of every man. Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die. Nor was the message difficult to give. It need not take the form of a good "talking. " By quiet indications the bridge would be built and span their lives with beauty. But she failed. For there was one quality in Henry for which she was never prepared, however much she reminded herself of it: his obtuseness. ”

„Whenever E. M. Forster is discussed, the phrase “only connect” is sure to come up sooner or later. The epigraph to Howards End, the book he described with typical modesty as “my best novel and approaching a good novel, ” seems to capture the leading idea of all his work—the moral importance of connection between individuals, across the barriers of race, class, and nation. What is not as frequently remembered is that, when Forster uses the phrase in Howards End, he is not actually talking about this kind of social connection, but about something more elusive and private—the difficulty of connecting our ordinary, conventional personalities with our transgressive erotic desires. ” Adam Kirsch in his review of The Prose and the Passion by Frank Kermode

If Forster strikes us as quaint, in a way that his contemporaries Joyce and Woolf do not, it is not simply because of his formal conservatism, but because he shows us, in Frank Kermode’s words, “a world in which what may now seem fairly trivial sexual gestures carry a freight of irreversible significance. ” As Kermode goes on to note in his brief but illuminating new study, “two stolen kisses are sufficient to sustain the plot of A Room with a View. ” Adam Kirsch, review of Kermode’s biography of Forster The Prose and the Passion

„A Passage to India…the most searching and complex of all his explorations of the possibilities and limitations, the promises and pitfalls, of human relationships. ” Norton Anthology, 2059

„A Passage to India is a triumph of aesthetic concentration and the balance of parts against the whole. ” Oxford Illustrated History, 427