Early life
- Birth name - Henry Morgan
- By mistake he was christened as Edward Morgan Forster (his father’s name)
- Single child of Edward Morgan Forster, an architect, who died in 1880, and of Alice 'Lily' Whichelo (1855-1945).
- Spent his boyhood with his aunt Marianne Thornton.
- She died in 1887 left him £8,000
- His happiest childhood years (1883-93) were spent at Rooksnest, Stevenage, a house he evokes in Howards End.
- In 1893 he and his mother moved to Tonbridge, and Forster attended Tonbridge School.
- He was deeply unhappy and developed a lasting dislike of public-school values.
- In 1897 he went to King's College, Cambridge.
- He found congenial friends and the atmosphere of free intellectual discussion.
1901 - 1924
- In 1901 he was elected to the Apostles.
- After 1901, he travelled a year in Italy with his mother and a cruise to Greece.
- That travel provided him material for his early novels.
- They satirized the attitudes of English tourists abroad.
- On his return from Greece he began to write for the new Independent Review launched in 1903 by a group of Cambridge friends, led by G. M. Trevelyan.
- In 1904 it published his first short story 'The Story of a Panic'.
- In 1905 he completed and published Where Angels Fear to Tread.
- He spent some months in Germany as tutor to the children of the Conntess von Arnim In 19o6.
- Became tutor to Syed Ross Masood, a striking and colonial Indian Muslim patriot, for whom Forster developed an intense affection.
- The Longest Journey appeared in 1907
- A Room with a View in 1908,
- Howards End in 1910 which established Forster as a writer of importance.
- In 1911 he published a collection of short stories The Celestial Omnibus, mostly pastoral and whimsical in tone and subject-matter.
- In 1912-13 he visited India for some months.
- Met Masood in Aligarh and travelled with him.
- In 1913 he visited the home of E.Carpenter near Chesterfield resulted in his writing Maurice,
- It’s a novel with a homosexual theme which he circulated privately.
- It was published posthumously in 1971.
- He worked for a while at the National Gallery then went to Alexandria in 1915 for the Red Cross.
- His Alexandria: A History and a Guide was published in 1922 (almost the entire stock was burned) and reprinted in revised form in 1938.
- In Alexandria he met Cavafy and an essay on Cavafy appeared in Pharos and Pharillon (1923).
- In 1921-22 he revisited India, working as personal secretary for the maharajah of the native state of Dewas.
- The completion of A Passage to India (1922-24) which he had begun before the war, was overshadowed by the death of his closest Egyptian friend Mohammed, but when the novel appeared in June 1924 it was highly acclaimed.
- Forster's feared that A Passage to India would be his last novel proved correct.
Literary activities
- Remainder of his life was devoted to a wide range of literary activities
- Over many years he took a firm stand against censorship, involving himself in the work of PEN and the NCCL, of which he became the first president, campaigning in 1928 against the suppression of R. Hall's The Well of Loneliness.
- Appeared in 1960 as a witness for the defence in the trial of the publishers of Lady Chatterley's Lover.
- In 1927 he delivered the Clark lectures at Cambridge
- It was printed the same year as Aspects of the Novel.
- The tone in these was in his own words 'informal, indeed talkative', and they contain the celebrated comment, 'yes-oh dear yes-the novel tells a story.'
- Leavis, representing the new school of Cambridge criticism, found the lectures 'intellectually null', but they were a popular success, and King's offered him a 3-year-fellowship, and, in 1946, an honorary fellowship and a permanent home.
Final works
- In 1928 The Eternal Moment, a volume of pre-1914 short stories, whimsical and dealing with the supernatural appeared
- He wrote two biographies, Goldsworthy Lowes Dickenson (1934) and Marianne Thornton (1956).
- Abinger Harvest, essays named after the village in Surrey in which Forster inherited a house on 1924, appeared in 1936.
- Two Cheers for Democracy was published in 1951.
- The Hill of Devi, a portrait of India through letters and commentary was published in 1953.
- Between 1949 and 1951 he worked with Eric Crozier on the libretto for Britten's opera Billy Budd.
- He spent his last year in King's College, and was awarded the OM in 1969.
- Maurice was followed by another posthumous publication, The Life to Come (1972), a collection of short stories, many with homosexual themes including the tragic story 'The Other Boat' written 1957-58.
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