E. M. Forster
Edward Morgan Forster OM CH was an English author
| Date of Birth | : | 01 Jan, 1879 |
| Date of Death | : | 07 Jul, 1970 |
| Place of Birth | : | Marylebone, London, United Kingdom |
| Profession | : | English Author |
| Nationality | : | British |
Edward Morgan Forster OM CH (এডওয়ার্ড মরগান ফরস্টার ওএম সিএইচ) was an English author, best known for his novels, particularly A Room with a View (1908), Howards End (1910) and A Passage to India (1924) He also wrote numerous short stories, essays, speeches and broadcasts, as well as a limited number of biographies and some pageant plays. He also co-authored the opera Billy Budd (1951). Today, he is considered one of the most successful of the Edwardian era English novelists.
After attending Tonbridge School he studied history and classics at King's College, Cambridge, where he met fellow future writers such as Lytton Strachey and Leonard Woolf. He then travelled throughout Europe before publishing his first novel, Where Angels Fear to Tread, in 1905.Many of his novels examine class difference and hypocrisy. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 22 separate years
Life
Forster, born at 6 Melcombe Place, Dorset Square, London NW1, which no longer stands, was the only child of the Anglo-Irish Alice Clara "Lily" (née Whichelo) and a Welsh architect, Edward Morgan Llewellyn Forster. He was registered as Henry Morgan Forster, but accidentally baptised Edward Morgan Forster. His father died of tuberculosis on 30 October 1880 before Forster's second birthday. In 1883, he and his mother moved to Rooks Nest, near Stevenage, Hertfordshire until 1893. This was to serve as a model for the house Howards End in his novel of that name. It is listed Grade I for historic interest and literary associations. Forster had fond memories of his childhood at Rooks Nest.
A section of the main building, Tonbridge SchoolAmong Forster's ancestors were members of the Clapham Sect, a social reform group in the Church of England. Forster inherited £8,000 (equivalent to £946,428 in 2021) in trust from his paternal great-aunt Marianne Thornton (daughter of the abolitionist Henry Thornton), who died on 5 November 1887. This was enough to live on and enabled him to become a writer. He attended as a day boy Tonbridge School in Kent, where the school theatre has been named in his honour,[8] although he is known to have been unhappy there. At King's College, Cambridge in 1897–1901, he became a member of a discussion society known as the Apostles (formally the Cambridge Conversazione Society). They met in secret to discuss their work on philosophical and moral questions. Many of its members went on to constitute what came to be known as the Bloomsbury Group, of which Forster was a member in the 1910s and 1920s. There is a famous recreation of Forster's Cambridge at the beginning of The Longest Journey. The Schlegel sisters of Howards End are based to some degree on Vanessa and Virginia Stephen. Forster graduated with a BA with second-class honours in both classics and history.In 1904, Forster travelled in Greece and Italy out of interest in their classical heritage. He then sought a post in Germany, to learn the language, and spent several months in the summer of 1905 in Nassenheide, Pomerania, (now the Polish village of Rzędziny) as a tutor to the children of the writer Elizabeth von Arnim. He wrote a short memoir of this experience, which was one of the happiest times in his life.
Career
Forster was awarded a Benson Medal in 1937. In the 1930s and 1940s Forster became a notable broadcaster on BBC Radio, and while George Orwell was the BBC India Section talks producer from 1941 to 1943, he commissioned from Forster a weekly book review Forster became publicly associated with the British Humanist Association. In addition to his broadcasting, he advocated individual liberty and penal reform and opposed censorship by writing articles, sitting on committees and signing letters.Forster was open about his homosexuality to close friends, but not to the public. He never married, but had a number of male lovers during his adult life. He developed a long-term relationship with Bob Buckingham (1904–1975), a married policeman, which lasted for 40 years. Forster included Buckingham and his wife May in his circle, which included J. R. Ackerley, a writer and literary editor of The Listener, the psychologist W. J. H. Sprott, and for a time, the composer Benjamin Britten. Other writers with whom he associated included Christopher Isherwood, the poet Siegfried Sassoon, and the Belfast-based novelist Forrest Reid. He was a close friend of the socialist poet and philosopher Edward Carpenter. A visit to Carpenter and his younger lover George Merrill in 1913 inspired Forster's novel Maurice, which is partly based on them.
In 1960, Forster began a relationship with the Bulgarian émigré Mattei Radev, a picture framer and art collector who moved in Bloomsbury group circles. He was Forster's junior by 46 years. They met at Long Crichel House, a Georgian rectory in Long Crichel, Dorset, a country retreat shared by Edward Sackville-West and the gallery-owner and artist Eardley Knollys.At 85 he went on a pilgrimage to the Wiltshire countryside that had inspired his favourite novel The Longest Journey, escorted by William Golding. In 1961 he was one of the first five authors named as a Companion of Literature by the Royal Society of Literature. In 1969 he was made a member of the Order of Merit. Forster died of a stroke on 7 June 1970 at the age of 91, at the Buckinghams' home in Coventry, Warwickshire His ashes, mingled with those of Buckingham, were later scattered in the rose garden of Coventry's crematorium, near Warwick University.
Work
Forster had five novels published in his lifetime. Although Maurice was published shortly after his death, it had been written nearly sixty years earlier. He never finished a seventh novel, Arctic Summer.
His first novel, Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), tells of Lilia, a young English widow who falls in love with an Italian, and of the efforts of her bourgeois relatives to get her back from Monteriano (based on San Gimignano). Philip Herriton's mission to retrieve her from Italy has features in common with that of Lambert Strether in Henry James's The Ambassadors. Forster discussed that work ironically and somewhat disapprovingly in his book Aspects of the Novel (1927). The novel was adapted as a 1991 film directed by Charles Sturridge.
Next, Forster published The Longest Journey (1907), an inverted Bildungsroman following the lame Rickie Elliott from Cambridge to a career as a struggling writer and then a post as a schoolmaster, married to an unappealing Agnes Pembroke. In a series of scenes on the Wiltshire hills, which introduce Rickie's wild half-brother Stephen Wonham, Forster attempts a kind of sublime related to those of Thomas Hardy and D. H. Lawrence.Forster's third novel, A Room with a View (1908), is his lightest and most optimistic. It was started in 1901, before any of his others, initially under the title Lucy. It explores young Lucy Honeychurch's trip to Italy with a cousin, and the choice she must make between the free-thinking George Emerson and the repressed aesthete Cecil Vyse. George's father Mr Emerson quotes thinkers who influenced Forster, including Samuel Butler. It was adapted as a film of the same name in 1985 by the Merchant Ivory team, starring Helena Bonham Carter and Daniel Day-Lewis, and as a televised adaptation of the same name in 2007 by Andrew Davies.
Where Angels Fear to Tread and A Room with a View can be seen as Forster's Italian novels. Both include references to the famous Baedeker guidebooks and concern narrow-minded middle-class English tourists abroad. The books share themes with his short stories collected in The Celestial Omnibus and The Eternal Moment.
Howards End (1910) is an ambitious "condition-of-England" novel about various groups among the Edwardian middle classes, represented by the Schlegels (bohemian intellectuals), the Wilcoxes (thoughtless plutocrats) and the Basts (struggling lower-middle-class aspirants). Howards End was adapted as a film in 1992 by the Merchant-Ivory team, starring Vanessa Redgrave, Emma Thompson, Anthony Hopkins, and Helena Bonham-Carter. Emma Thompson won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance as Margaret Schlegel. It was also adapted as a miniseries in 2017. An opera libretto Howards End, America was created in 2016 by Claudia Stevens.
Forster's greatest success, A Passage to India (1924), takes as its subject the relations between East and West, seen through the lens of India in the later days of the British Raj. Forster connects personal relations with the politics of colonialism through the story of the Englishwoman Adela Quested, the Indian Dr. Aziz, and the question of what did or did not happen between them in the Marabar Caves. Forster makes special mention of the author Ahmed Ali and his Twilight in Delhi in a preface to its Everyman's Library Edition. A Passage to India was adapted as a play in 1960, directed by Frank Hauser, and as a film in 1984, directed by David Lean.
Maurice (1971), published posthumously, is a homosexual love story that also returns to matters familiar from Forster's first three novels, such as the suburbs of London in the English home counties, the experience of attending Cambridge, and the wild landscape of Wiltshire. The novel was controversial, given that Forster's homosexuality had not been publicly known or widely acknowledged. Today's critics continue to debate over the extent to which Forster's sexuality and personal activities influenced his writing.[38] Maurice was adapted as a film in 1987 by the Merchant Ivory team.Early in his career, Forster attempted a historical novel about the Byzantine scholar Gemistus Pletho and the Italian condottiero Sigismondo de Malatesta, but was dissatisfied with the result and never published it, though he kept the manuscript and later showed
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