E. M. Forster(1879–1970)

Edward Morgan Forster was born at Melcombe Place in Marylebone on the first of January 1879, the only child of an Anglo-Irish architect and a mother from a Clapham Sect evangelical line. His father Edward died of consumption when the boy was twenty-two months old. He was raised by his mother Lily and a circle of paternal great-aunts whose money sustained the household, and from 1883 to 1893 the family lived at Rooksnest, a small house outside Stevenage in Hertfordshire that he loved and that he later rewrote almost detail-for-detail as the title house of *Howards End*. The lease ran out when he was fourteen and the family moved to Tonbridge. He hated the school. The misery of the Tonbridge years went into the depiction of Sawston School in *The Longest Journey*, twelve years later.

He went up to King's College, Cambridge in 1897 and was elected to the Apostles, the undergraduate discussion society that produced the inner circle of what became Bloomsbury. He read classics, then history. The Cambridge years gave him the foundational friendships of his adult life (Lytton Strachey, John Maynard Keynes, Roger Fry, Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson) and his first sense that the homosexual life he had begun to recognise as his own could be talked about, in a closed and coded register, among people who would not betray him. He left in 1901, travelled in Italy and Greece on a small inheritance, and came home with the material for the first two novels.

The Edwardian decade was the productive one. *Where Angels Fear to Tread* appeared in 1905, *The Longest Journey* in 1907, *A Room with a View* in 1908 and *Howards End* in 1910. The four books made him, by his early thirties, the most-discussed English novelist of his generation alongside H. G. Wells and Arnold Bennett, and the one whose form most clearly inherited from George Eliot and Jane Austen the moral comedy of the English liberal manner. *Howards End*, in particular, anchored his reputation: the title-page epigraph *Only connect* became the most-quoted sentence in English liberal humanism through the next century. He wrote *Maurice*, an explicit novel of homosexual life with a happy ending, between 1913 and 1914, showed it to a circle of friends including Edward Carpenter at Millthorpe, and locked it in a drawer. He would not publish it in his lifetime.

He went to Egypt in 1915 as a Red Cross searcher among the wounded of Gallipoli, fell in love with a young Egyptian tram conductor named Mohammed el Adl, who was married, and conducted the most consequential love affair of his early life across two languages and the British administrative apparatus until Mohammed's death from tuberculosis in 1922. He went to India twice, in 1912 and as private secretary to the Maharaja of Dewas Senior in 1921, and in 1924 published *A Passage to India*, the book on the impossibility of friendship across the imperial barrier that completed his fiction. He published no more novels in the forty-six years he lived after it. He was forty-five when *A Passage to India* came out. He did not, by his own later account, lose the wish to write fiction; he lost confidence that the kind of fiction he could write was still the right answer to the kind of world the 1920s had become.

King's elected him an honorary fellow in 1946 and he lived in college rooms for the rest of his life, returning to a small house at Coventry only at the end. The companion of his middle and late years was Bob Buckingham, a married Metropolitan Police officer he met in 1930 and whose wife May, after early difficulty, accepted into a three-way household that lasted forty years until Forster's death. The two unfinished volumes of essays, broadcasts and the libretto for Britten's *Billy Budd* (1951) carried his reputation through the post-war decades. He turned down a knighthood three times, accepted the Order of Merit in 1969, and died at the Buckinghams' house in Coventry on 7 June 1970, ninety-one years old. *Maurice* was published the following year, and the volume of homosexual short stories *The Life to Come* in 1972. The Forster name in its dominant English form is the metathesis variant of Foster, the office of forester rephrased; he was the literary head of the surname for two generations.