E.M. Forster: A Study of His Life and Writing Advice

It may sound cliché to say that it’s important to stand up for what you believe in, but in the case of E.M. Forster, doing so defined his writing. Forster was a gay man living during a time when it was deadly and illegal to be found out, so he lived in a constant state of fear. He fell in love with several men throughout his life—the earliest being in college—and each one of the young men he was interested in, or even deeply in love with, were doomed to marry women, surrendering to the crushing, unseen weight of the heteronormative world they were forced to live in: England in the early 20th century. Forster didn’t fight back—his very last novel was published after his death because he was too afraid to have its obvious gay storyline be connected to him—but he did end up shaping his writing around the terrible isolation of being an underdog in a world where no one understands you. That’s his writing in a nutshell, and that’s the secret ingredient that made him into a well-known author. He always believed in and stood up for the people and countries who were worse off, and constantly viewing things from a perspective that no one else did gave his writing a unique voice. His life and writings are filled with fascinating pieces of information we can learn from—so let’s take a look into the life and writing of E.M. Forster.

Forster's Life

E.M. Forster was born in 1879, in Middlesex, England, and he was known simply as Morgan to people who knew him—although his full name was Henry Moran Forster, and the addition of Edward was apparently an accident, according to this article by Subashini Prakash.

This Brittanica article states that his father had a strongly evangelical personality with a “high sense of moral responsibility” and his mother’s attitude was more carefree and generous, and growing up in such an environment of opposites gave Forster an “enduring insight into the nature of domestic tensions.” However, Subashini Prakash writes that Forster’s father died from tuberculosis when he was two, so he was raised by his mother and great-aunt. She gave Forster an inheritance when she died in 1887, which was enough money to live and pursue his dream of writing. He was a day student at Tonbridge School, although his time there led him to “form the basis of many of his criticisms of the English public school system.”

After that, Forster attended Cambridge from 1897 to 1901, according to Anthony Domestico, and he studied history, literature and philosophy—he also became a member of a group called the Cambridge Apostles, who discussed philosophical skepticism; this group heavily shaped Forster’s liberalism and he ended up leaving the Christianity of his childhood behind. Other members of the Cambridge Apostles included Sir James Frazer, G.E. Moore, Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, and other people who would end up being future members of the Bloomsbury Group, which was a group of artists and authors.

When Forster attended Cambridge University, he enjoyed the freedom it brought—for the very first time he could pursue his own interests; he gained a sense of the “uniqueness of the individual, of the healthiness of moderate skepticism, and of the importance of Mediterranean civilization as a counterbalance to the more straitlaced attitudes of northern European countries.” The formation of this viewpoint was essential as it ended up influencing all his future writings—and it’s no wonder he felt drawn to anywhere that was the opposite of the restrictive society he grew up in.

This incredible article by Wendy Moffat describes that for his entire writing career, Forster always “entered political fights from the position of the underdog.” Forster always argued that Western democracies “deeply misunderstood the third world,” and he protested against fascism, censorship, communism, Anti-Semitism, even—considering the time period—the British occupation of Egypt and India, and against racism and jingoism and anything remotely English. He was the author who raised his voice against “the edifice of conformity”—and he often did so alone. Alone when it came to love and alone when it came to standing up for what mattered to him, he nevertheless persisted with an unbreakable belief in what he knew to be right. Although he couldn’t be public about the fact he was gay, he found ways to express his belief for freedom of self. Both this loneliness and rock-hard belief found their way into his writing, and both of these elements led to him becoming one of the best writers of the early 20th century.

Forster only wrote a handful of novels during his lifetime, but each one was secretly bursting with his true identity in very subtle ways that would escape the notice of homophobic readers—that is to say, everyone at the time. Wendy Moffat’s wonderfully written and in-depth article states that Forster’s first story was called “The Story of a Panic,” and it was about a schoolboy who gets separated by his family because of a huge thunderstorm. The storm causes him to become “uninhibited and wild,” and do such shocking things such as hugging a male Italian waiter. While the story ends tragically, its comic power comes from the fact that the English narrator is too stupid and homophobic to realize the boy is gay—it almost feels like a meme about gay self-expression contrasting with obliviousness written significantly ahead of its time. The gay joy of the protagonist is represented by the “anarchic” spirit of Pan, and by writing something that so closely reflected his own fears and desires, Forster “uncorked a wild energy” from within himself.  

This wild energy went would be seen in all his future writings—and would even become the result of some plot struggles when he was wrestling with creating satisfying drafts of A Room With a View. During the moment when a guy character, Cecil Vyse, was going to propose to his female protagonist, Lucy, Forster abandoned the draft “in a moment of queer panic,” and he wouldn’t return to the story for six years. All authors struggle with one aspect of the writing process or another, and Forster struggled with plots. While he took a break from working on that troublesome plot to write and publish his first novel in 1904, he eventually finished and published A Room With a View in 1907.   

When he wrote A Room With a View, Forster came to understand both himself and his characters better than before. In reference to Wendy Moffat’s beautiful article once again, the topic Forster spent his life writing about was the “tragicomic limitations of the English character and the moral consequences of an ‘undeveloped heart’”—in other words, his writings puzzled over the continental obstacle of how homophobes could be so narrow-minded, mean-spirited, and stupid to not let queer people be themselves.

This enduring exploration showed itself in other plots, as well. His last novel, A Passage to India, which was released in 1924, was “burnished with a tragic wisdom,” in the words of “A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life of E. M. Forster”, another insightful piece by Wendy Moffat. Writing in the voice of an Indian character, Forster pondered whether it was even possible to be friends with someone from England. The meaning of that is clear enough, and indeed, in the book, Forster’s “deep and enlightened characters” face an unforgiving world that “seemed destined to break their wills and their hearts.”

A Passage to India was Forster’s last novel, even though he was only in his forties. He simply never wrote anymore, and it’s easy to understand why. He was exhausted from fighting without a result, from constantly questioning the nonsensical hate-filled homophobia of English society. He was tired that he was never making any headway in his fight. By the time he had published Howards End in 1910, he had grown tired of writing about the “unspoiled-countryside settings, the oh-so-English people in their white linen suits, the clever repartee”—he didn’t want to fill his writing with a society, characters, and heteronormative marriages that did not reflect an ounce of who he really was. In this thorough article by Alexander Chee from The New Republic, Forster plainly states this frustration, sadness and anger in a diary entry from 1911, documenting his “weariness of the only subject that I both can and may treat—the love of men for women & vice versa.”

Forster's Impact on Current Literature

In the introduction to the book The World of E. M. Forster—E. M. Forster and the World, editors Krzysztof Fordoński and Anna Kwiatkowska state that Forster’s position in English literature and culture “hardly requires introduction or justification,” such is the enormity of his impact. A few months after his death in 1970, a “sizable body of previously unpublished works” was discovered, which gave the writer and his works even more dimension, and the result is that the “rediscovery” of his writing has never stopped; Forster remains a “constant source of inspiration for new generations of writers, composers, directors, and other artists who respond to his works.”

Michelle K. Yost writes that Forster is “intimately tied to the Modernist movement” because he demonstrated the width of his education through the experiences and dialogue of his characters by incorporating various sources. To elaborate, in chapter one of The World of E.M. Forster, the chapter’s author, Francesca Pierini, states that Forster’s work depicts Italy as “holding a unique constellation of counter-values, characteristics perceived at the opposite spectrum of British ideals.” While some Forster critics argue whether he should even be connected to the term Modernist—citing Forster’s skill at writing with an omniscient narrative voice and ahead-of-their-time moral values as literary markers in the Victorian period—other critics resist this view by citing that Forster “made significant contributions to the modern novel through both his own novels and his criticism.”

For instance, in chapter two of Regenerating the Novel: Gender and Genre in Woolf, Forster, Sinclair, and Lawrence by James J. Miracky, Miracky writes on page twenty-seven that Forster’s Modernism appears in “alternations in the narrative contract’ through the insertion of [a] homosexual subtext.” Miracky also writes that the “fantasy” of Forster’s writing—fantasy being defined here as an “alternative to realism that…[suggests] alternative desires and identities”—uses queer existence in his works to “queer the literary form” of the time. This piece from Georgetown University doubles down on this statement with the declaration that “Forster’s contributions to the form were significant” because he was “one of the first authors to ‘queer’ the novel.” Going back to Miracky, he writes that all of Forster’s novels have a “homosexual counter-narrative that actively undermines the overt heterosexual narrative” that was forced to dominate the novel’s plot due to the time period.

Forster's Writing Struggles and His Legacy

According to Anthony Domestico, Forster’s early short stories and novels were “redolent of an age that was shaking off the shackles of Victorianism.” In his writing, Forster supported women having their own rights and being seen as important individuals in their own right (this theme was adapted from English novelists before his time, such as George Meredith) and Forster also broke the norms of Victorian writing that favorited “elaborations and intricacies,” instead writing in a freer style.

With A Room With a View, as well as his 1910 novel Howards End, Forster secured his place as one of the leading British writers of his generation—he was a “comic moralist,” someone interested in examining ideological clashes that resulted in melodrama and converting those results into fiction. In “A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life of E. M. Forster,” Wendy Moffat writes that Forster’s novels “looked at life from a complicated position—finding a dark vein of social comedy in the tragic blindness of British self-satisfaction,” and that the novels also had a “sinewy wit” to them.

And yet, the keen intelligence of Forster’s writing hid the fact that he struggled with inventing plots. In 1901, when he was coming up with the initial outline for A Room With a View, he wrote down the names of the characters, followed by a frustrated note that the characters were “Doing what?” 

Despite this, he had a razor-sharp observation when it came to what elements make up a strong plot—undoubtedly due to the painful struggles of his life. It is Forster who wrote this iconic quote about writing: “'The king died and then the queen died’ is a story. ‘The king died, and then the queen died of grief’ is a plot.” This tells you all you need to know about both his life and writing—he was open and aware to the pain of others in a way other authors were not.

This awareness and support of others suffering—of always supporting the underdog in real life and in his fiction—is what makes Forster a great writer. His perspective and experience of gay suffering under the oppression of British heteronormativity gives every aspect of his writing a sharp, human realness that makes his stories relatable and timeless despite the passage of time; they are tragic and comedic and honest. Forster had his finger on the pulse of what makes excellent writing: experience and observation and the mingling of the two. What do you experience about what you observe, and what does that make you feel? How are your personal experiences tied to your observations? If you ask yourself these questions, if you persist at crafting a story through your struggles—such as Forster struggled with plots—then you’ll have truly breathed life into your writing and made something extraordinary.