A Room with a View

I loved it. My first intimation of the possibilities of fiction – Zadie SmithHe says, and even more implies, things that no other novelist does, and we can go on reading Forster indefinitely * The Times *

Edward Morgan Forster was born in London in 1879. He attended Tonbridge School and later King’s College, Cambridge, where he was elected to an Honorary Fellowship in 1946, maintaining a lifelong connection.

Forster described his life as undramatic and was notably modest about his accomplishments. In a BBC interview on his eightieth birthday, he stated, “I have not written as much as I’d like to… I write for two reasons—partly to make money and partly to win the respect of people whom I respect… I had better add that I am quite sure I am not a great novelist.” Despite his self-effacing views, critics and the public recognized him as “one of the most esteemed English novelists of his time,” as noted in his obituary in The Times.

His published works include six novels:

• Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905)
• The Longest Journey (1907)
• A Room with a View (1908)
• Howard’s End (1910)
• A Passage to India (published fourteen years after Howard’s End, it won the Prix Femina Vie Heureuse and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize)
• Maurice (a novel on a homosexual theme, finished in 1914 and published posthumously in 1971)

Forster also authored:

• Two volumes of short stories
• Two collections of essays
• Aspects of the Novel, a critical work
• The Hill of Devi, a record of his visits to the Indian State of Dewas Senior
• Two biographies
• Two books about Alexandria, where he worked for the Red Cross during the First World War
• The libretto for Benjamin Britten’s opera Billy Budd, co-written with Eric Crozier

Edward Morgan Forster died in June 1970.