The Longest Journey by E. M. Forster

The Longest Journey by E. M. Forster (1907, 360 pages)


The Longest Journey is E. M. Forster's (1879 to 1970-UK)  second novel.   I have now read all of his novels but for his posthumously published Maurice (written in 1913 but not published until 1971).  My advise on Forster is to first read his incredibly powerful A Passage to India  then if you want to read more of his work read Howard's End which many consider a better written book.   The two books are very different.   Then if you like Howard's End enough to want to read more Forster, read his novels in publication order.  If you like short stories, he has written some good ones.  (There is some additional background information on Forster in my prior posts on his work.)

Working at the BBC

I have expressed as well as I could my enthusiasm for the work of Forster in my prior posts.   I will just make a few simple observations on The Longest Journey.     I think most people who decide to read The Longest Journey are probably dedicated readers of Forster.   It does not seem a likely book just to pick at random to read.


The novel center on a young man who has just entered Cambridge.   If you want to get as feel for what it was like to go to Cambridge in 1907 this would be the book to read.   It is a bildungsroman.     To me the biggest pleasure of this book is in all of the clever things that are said and  picture of college life it presents.   There are also romances and some sexual ambiguity.   Some have said Forster's heart is not in the male-female relationships but that may just be reading his life into his novels.   There are a number of interesting people in the novel.


I am keeping my post short here as this is a book for the Forster believer who probably has already read it anyway.   


You can download The Longest Journey in Kindle and other formats HERE for free.   If you prefer you could also download it for $11.99 from Amazon.   There really is little need to buy an e-book of an older work.   


Please share your experience with Forster with us.  


Mel u

A Room With a View by E. M. Forster

A Room With a View by E. M. Forster (1908, 176 pages)

Italy is the Tropics?

The Reading Life E. M. Forster Project

"There is something baffling and evasive in the very nature of his gifts."-Virginia Woolf 




A Room With a View is E. M. Forster's (1879-1970-Edward Morgan-UK) third novel.    (There is some background information on him in my prior posts.)    Forster's enduring fame comes from his Howards End and A Passage to India.   I have decided to read and post on all his novels (there are only six).    I will just post briefly on A Room With a View as I think there is less interest in this novel than in his "big two".

I think it was common in the first two decades of the 20th century for upper class English men and women to look upon Italy as somehow an exotic more earthy kind of place than their homeland.    The people are presented as less reserved and it is also seen as a place where one could do what you would not back home.    Sometimes in Forster you almost expect Pan to jump out from behind an olive tree in the beautiful Tuscan hills.   Italy is also a place where one could go for a total immersion in high artistic culture, robust foods, and a flirtation with the promiscuous natives.   It is almost like Italy is an exotic tropical country (or as close as the people in Forster's novels will get to one)   superimposed on an ancient civilization.

The first half of A Room With a View is set in Italy.    As the novel opens Lucy Huneychurch and her sister are complaining because their room in the hotel they are staying at does not have the beautiful view they were lead to believe it would have.    George Emerson and his father, also English, offer  to let the sisters have their room which has a great view.    The sisters are perplexed by this.    First off all it is not polite to intrude into the conversations of strangers and secondly they are not convinced the Emerson's are gentlemen and they do not understand their motives.     A lot of the novel is spent with characters analysing each other.   Lucy and the younger Mr.  Emerson end up falling in love but the older dominating sister will have none of it and even Lucy is not sure it is right.  Maybe it is just the power of Italy,  just a vacation romance.

Part Two finds Lucy back in her hometown in England, Surrey.   There is more of the wonderful conversations and brilliant observations I have come to expect in Forster.  Mr Emerson enters the picture again.    Lucy has some more romantic adventures.   I liked the ending a  lot.


I read this via Dailylit.com .

I will probably next read his The Longest Journey.


Please share your experience with Forster with us.

Mel u

E. M. Forster: A Life by P. N. Furbank

 E. M. Forster:  A Life by P. N. Furbank (1978, 616 pages)

A First Rate Literary Biography

E. M. Forster on The Reading Life

P. N. Furbank (Phillip-1920-UK-also the author of biographies on Samuel Butler and Diderot) has written a very good comprehensive biography of E. M. Forster (1879 to 1970-UK-Morgan), one of the great novelists of the 20th century.    Forster is the author of Howards End and A Passage to India and four other novels.    

There is a lot to  like and learn in this biography.   I  have read quite a few literary biographies over the years and this book is one of the best.   Furbank met Forster when he was attending Cambridge and Forster was living there as a fellow at King's College.  Forster suggested that Furbank write his biography.

Furbank does a very good job of bringing Forster and his world to life for us.    Forster is a GLBT icon.   Furbank tells us as much about the private life of Forster as he feels he can say with certainty.   Forster's only sexual interest was in men, often working class men  much younger than him.   He maintained several long term kind of odd avuncular relationships with these men, often extending them support for long periods and even becoming friends with their wives.     It does seem that Forster was exploited in some cases by these young men.   Reading a bit between the lines, what little sex Forster had in his life was quick, furtive and not a lot of fun.   

Two of the biggest things in Forster's live were his long stays in Alexandria Egypt and  in India.   In Alexandria he wrote a travel/history guide and fell in love with a street car conductor.   In one of the most interesting segments of the book Furbank tells us about the time Forster spent in India as the adviser to an Indian Price (think gay Arthur act alike Maharajah).   He did everything from tell him how to conduct affairs of state to sharing his opinion on which of the royal  dancing boys were the most beautiful.   

One question we have to ask is why did Forster stop writing novels in 1924 (he talked about some others  but never got started) even though he lived on for 46 more years. One reason is that Forster inherited enough at age 45,  along with the money  he had coming in from his novels,  so he did not have to write  anymore.  Furbank tells us that Forster also had grown tired of writing stories about the relationships of men and women.     He seems to  like to "putz about" with friends, his mother and other relatives and Cambridge students.   He also had formed a long term relationship with a policemen (we are not sure what went on behind closed doors here) and his wife.    They kept a room in their house for Forster (he helped them buy it) when he wanted to get away from Cambridge.  He was friends with Virginia and Leonard Woolf and is considered a Bloomsbury figure.   He was at Katherine Mansfield's funeral in Paris.   He helped Mulk Raj Anand get published.     He was a true friend,  (though he could be peevish), a very good son, a true lover of the reading life, and really a very good person.    As far as we learn in this biography, Forster never did anything mean to  anyone.     

Furbank really helped me understand how Forster lived his life.   He does a good job talking about his novels as they relate to where he was in his life when he wrote them.

I think Forster devotees can, though they would mostly deny this, into two camps, one for Howards End and one for A Passage to India.   Furbank is in the first group and I am in the second.     Among at least book bloggers I am in the minority but for sure I think both novels are great works.   

I would say first read A Passage to India then read Howards End and then ponder your next move.   I intend to read and post on all his novels and much of his short fiction.   

Please share your experience with Forster with us

Mel u

Howards End by E. M. Forster

Howards End by E. M. Forster (1910, 256 pages)

"Only Connect"


"But the Imperialist is not what he thinks or seems. He is a destroyer. He prepares the way for cosmopolitanism, and though his ambitions may be fulfilled, the earth that he inherits will be grey."

E. M. Forster on The Reading Life

Last month I discovered something the rest of the literary book blog world knew a long time ago, it seems.   That discovery was the wonder, beauty and wisdom of the novels of E. M. Forster (Morgan-1879-1970-UK).   A Passage to India has been on my TBR list for a very long time.   I checked Dailylit.com and they did not have it.   I ended up subscribing to his very first novel Where Angels Fear to Trade.   I totally loved it and everyone said it paled in comparison to A Passage to India and Howards End.   I wanted to read A Passage to India next and was able to locate a Pdf of it online (all of his novels are in the public domain with the exception, I think, of Maurice which was published posthumously.)   It sad to note he wrote no novels for the last forty six years of his life!     

Howards End is the name of a grand old house.   The house is really as much a character in the novel as any of the people.   There are three distinct groups of people in the novel, all with their ties to each other.  The Wilcoxes are affluent, very class conscious and the owners of the house.   The Schlegels are half-German (remember WWI is right on the door steps) and middle class.   The middle class Schlegels and the Wilcoxes have frequent social contact and their is romantic attraction between different family members and there is a marriage.  There is also a working class family in the mix.    Things get complicated and I will let you discover the plot yourself if you choose to read it one day.

I tried to formulate in my mind a kind of comparison of his two great novels.

Everyone says Howards End (Forster said it also) was his finest work.   To me Howards End is also the greater work of art but it lacks the sheer cosmic firepower of parts of A Passage to India.   It almost feels as if two different novelists wrote these works.   A Passage to India deals with large scale social, religious and metaphysical issues.   Some of the prose is near over powering.   To use a comparison that Forster might have used about War and Peace, A Passage to India is his Fifth Symphony.   It just kind of overpowered me.   Howards End is not as muscular a work, in my opinion, as Passage to India but it is a subtler domestic retelling of the cosmic issues of A Passage to India.    Howards End is like a series of interrelated Mozart concertos-you have to listen intently to feel the power.    

If A Passage to India is Forster's War and Peace then  Howards End is his Sentimental Education.    

I would really suggest one read all six novels in sequence now that I see what a great writer he is but  for most I would say first read Passage to India then Howards End then decide where to proceed on with Forster from there based on how you like him.

Here is a selection from Howards End that will give you a feel for Forster's prose style.

"She was parting from these Wilcoxes for the second time. Paul and his mother, ripple and great wave, had flowed into her life and ebbed out of it for ever. The ripple had left no traces behind: 
the wave had strewn at her feet fragments torn from the unknown. A curious seeker, she stood for a while at the verge of the sea that tells so little, but tells a little, and watched the outgoing of this last tremendous tide. Her friend had vanished in agony, but not, she believed, in degradation. Her withdrawal had hinted at other things besides disease and pain. Some leave our life with tears, others with an insane frigidity; Mrs. Wilcox had taken the middle course, which only rarer natures can pursue. She had kept proportion. She had told a little of her grim secret to her friends, but not too much; she had shut up her heart--almost, but not entirely.
It is thus, if there is any rule, that we ought to die--neither as victim nor as fanatic, but as the seafarer who can greet with an equal eye the deep that he is entering, and the shore that he must leave."

Please share your experiences with Forster with us.

I am reading his A Room with a View now as well as P. N. Furbank's biography of Forster.   Forster is an Iconic GLBT author.

Mel u

Aspects of the Novel by E. M. Forster

Aspects of the Novel by E. M. Forster (1927, 156 pages)

My Passage from  Neophyte to Acolyte

Resources for Indonesian Short Stories Day-August 17  

E. M. Forster on The Reading Life

Aspects of the Novel was born as a series of lectures  E. M. (Morgan) Forster gave at Cambridge in 1927.    I have recently read and posted on his Where Angels Fear to Tread and Passage to India.   I am nearly done with Howards End.    I love these books and will read all of his novels soon, I hope.   I am also reading E. F. Furbank's masterful biography of Forster (1879 to 1970-UK).   I was moved to learn that Forster was at the funeral of Katherine Mansfield in Paris and was a good friend of Elizabeth Bowen, two central Reading Life authors.   

Aspects of the Novel is not a "heavy" or an academic book at all.   It is not a work of  deep scholarship with a lot of axes to grind or theories to prove.   It is a friendly, very interesting work by an author that loved the reading life, had the leisure to read a great deal, and produced at least two masterworks of the novel.    It really feels to me just like what it in fact was when it originated:   a friendly lecture at a social event by a man who loved novels to an audience that really wanted to hear what he was saying.   Forster was so secure in his knowledge and with his audience that he felt no need to be trendy or even especially original.   He does try hard to be interesting and tell the truth.     The lectures have a relaxed feel to them that I enjoyed and it seems that Forster enjoyed writing them.   At times Forster was talking about works I have not heard of but that it a great thing, for me at least.    

One of the things people will want to know is simply what novels does Forster endorse.    His choices are very interesting but not at all shocking.    He says several times the greatest novel ever is War and Peace for its creation of the world in a book.        Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov is mentioned as the deepest exploration of the soul. (I wondered if Bunny Garnett was in the audience.)     He loves Cranford  by Elizabeth Gaskell.    Among his greats are Proust, Henry James,  Dickens and Jane Austin and Lawrence Sterne.     He has sections on story lines, people, plot, fantasy, prophecy and pattern in the novel.   He talks a good bit about the work of George Meridith, Walter Scott and Samuel Butler (three authors I have not read yet).    He says Moby Dick is one of the greatest of all novels, in a time before it was fashionable.   You will walk away with a bigger TBR list for sure!   I am really looking forward to rereading Tristram Shandy after reading Forster's brilliant remarks on it.   I know I have to read something by Walter Scott soon.

Using Bleak House by Dickens as his example, Forster says in a novel an author can sometimes let his audience relax by being clear and simple and at other times he can strain the intellect to the maximum by using different narrative methods and points of view as he proceeds.

This work is in the public domain so you can find a source to download it if you like.

I do not know if it would still be widely  read if it was not written by Forster.  

I very much enjoyed this book and learned a lot from it.    It is not, as I said, an academic work.   Forster does not try to prove that what he says is right with a 1000 foot notes.   You are assumed to be very well read and a lover of the novel.      I think my enjoyment of these lectures was also increased by what I have learned about the atmosphere of Cambridge in the 1920 that allowed me to somehow insert myself in the audience.

Please share your experiences with Forster with us and help out Forster neophytes such as myself.

Mel u

"The Machine Stops" by E. M. Forster

"The Machine Stops" by E. M. Forster (1909,  12 pages)

"There was the button that produced literature. and there were of course the buttons by which she communicated with her friends. The room, though it contained nothing, was in touch with all that she cared for in the world."



E. M. Forster on The Reading Life


I think the more your life has been taken over by the Internet the more you will be amazed by E. M. Forster's 1909 look into the future displayed in his marvelous short story "The Machine Stops".    


Where Angels Fear to Tread and Passage to India have completely convinced me of the literary genius of E.  M. Forster, just as they have 1000s and 1000s of others.    I am currently reading his Howards End and am awestruck by it also.   Not just for the quality of the prose and the profound characterizations but also for the many brilliant authorial asides.   Forster is as wise as they come!   


In addition to six novels, Forster wrote some travel books and essays and a number of short stories.    I think all of his work is now in the public domain with the exception of a novel, Maurice intentionally not published until after his death,    For sure I will soon read all of his novels (maybe having to wait on Maurice for practical reasons) and I want to read some of his short stories.   A number of articles on Forster I read said his most memorable short story was "The Machine Stops".   


As the story opens we are in the living quarters of a middle aged woman.   She communicates with the world through "The Machine".    She speaks to people around the world through it, all of her knowledge comes through it, she does not see something as valid unless the machine contains it.  Hum, starting to sound strangely familiar.   


The atmosphere of the Earth is toxic.   There have been it seems terrible wars or ecological disasters so everyone lives underground.    You can go on a tourist type trip to the surface if you like but why bother.    The Machine (no one fully understands how it works or can visualize a time before The Machine Existed) somehow produces food and oxygen etc.   People spent their time on self improvement activities and a lot of time is devoted to lectures.


In one very funny swipe at academic historians, during a lecture on the French Revolution the speaker boasts that he will not tell us what actually happened (that would be ever so degrading!) but what Professor Smith said about Professor Jones's remark on Dr. Quong's account of the Mongolian commentaries on the work of Carlyle and so on to the tenth degree.


One day the central female character gets a message that her son, who lives on the other side of the world wants to see her in person.   This will call for her to take an airship.   There used to be a vast fleet of them linking the cities of the world up but  no one really travels anymore.  


Her son tells her that he has seen signs that the machine is breaking down.    To even mention this can lead to one being made "homeless", sent to live on the surface of the  earth. 


I do not want to tell more of the plot of this story.   I think a lot of readers will be shocked by this vision of the future from 1909.    I really liked this story and hope at least fellow Forster lovers will  read it.

You can read "The Machine Stops" HERE  


Please share your experience with Forster with us.


Mel u










































Mel u

A Passage to India by E. M. Forster

A Passage to India by E. M. Forster (1924,  368 pages)

A Magnificent Novel

"Fear is everywhere; the British Raj rests on it"

E. M. Forster on The Reading Life

Where Angels Fear to Trade was my first E. M. Forster (1879 to 1970-UK) novel.   It is a wonderful read, funny, great conversations, good satire of the English upper class and brings its characters totally to life.    I liked it a lot and knew I wanted to read his other five novels.    It is a very good totally worth reading novel.    But for me it pales badly in comparison to A Passage to India which simply stunned me by its sheer brilliance, depth of wisdom, and the beauty of the writing.

Forster lived in India for a few years, working as personal secretary for a maharajah.  (He wrote a non-fiction account of this experience, The Hill of Devi,  which is on my TBR list now.)    The time spent there clearly made a deep impression  on Forster.

Before I read A Passage to India I had seen the movie based on it a couple of times on TV.   I was thus familiar with, as I think most readers will be,  the basic plot of the novel before reading it.   This did take a little from the suspense of the big trial scene in the novel but maybe that was good as it allowed me to focus on the wonderful prose and the thoughts behind them.

I won't relay any of the plot as I think most will have at least seen the movie.

Even though Forster's  (I keep wanting to spell his name wrong!)  life was as British Raj as it could be (Maharajahs were puppet rulers for the British and their British appointed advisers were often the real rulers) A Passage to India is one of the greatest novels about the colonial experience, seen from all sides.   There are many sides to be seen from in British India.   There are no simple "bad guys"-no colonial monsters with a whip (but we know they are there),  no good "natives" or "bad ones".
(Side note, yesterday I saw the old Errol Flynn movie, The Charge of the Light Brigade-might be an exciting movie with good dialogue but it is totally colonial in its attitudes toward India with good Indians helping the British and sinister Guru like figures opposing them and I thought how simple - in the bad sense-the thinking behind this movie was.)

One of the lines in the novel that really struck me was when one of the central Indian characters told him British friend Mr Fielding that the Indians supported the English in the last great war but in the next one they will use it to obtain their Independence.   Kind of a chilling line form 1924, for me at least.

There a lot in this novel on the history of Indian and its religious faith.   The sections on the caves is justifiably considered one of the great  passages in 20th century literature.  

A Passage to India is one of the books in Clifton Fadiman's Lifetime Reading Plan so it was a "check off" for me. Fadiman says perhaps Howard's End is Forster's best novel so I think that will be the next of his works I will read. Some may think the "thoughts" behind A Passage to India might at times get in the way of the narrative structure or just find it a "bit heavy" with religious theorizing and other may see it as anti-British (it is kind of hard to be proud of the British Raj!).

I just amazed by this novel. I think it should be your first Forster that way if you never get around to his other works you have at least read it!

Please share your experience with Forster with us.


Mel u

Where Angels Fear to Tread by E. M. Forster

Where Angels Fear to Tread by E. M. Forster (1905, 124 pages)

At His BBC Job

E. M. Forster's First Novel

" For fools rush in where angels fear to tread"   Alexander Pope 1711

I have wanted to read a novel by E. M. Forster (Edward Morgan-1879 - 1970-UK) for a long time now.    I checked on one of my favorite online reading sources, Dailylit.com.   They did not have the work I actually most wanted to read, A Passage to India but they did have a few others (he wrote six novels) available.   I decided to keep it simple and I subscribed to the shortest one (64 installments-installments are normally about 2.5 or so pages long)  Where Angels Fear to Tread.   This is also his first novel so that was another reason in my mind to select it.   


In February I read and very much enjoyed Forster's short story "The Story of a Panic.

I knew that Forster was associated with the Bloomsbury group loosely.   He inherited enough money at an early age to support himself.    He attended Cambridge.

I enjoyed Where Angels Fear to Tread a lot.   The plot is not hard to follow at all.   The characters are drawn from the English upper classes.   It is a gentle satire centered on the Herriton family.   The family is concerned about Lilia Herriton, staying in Italy for a year to calm her nerves, when they hear she has fallen in love with an Italian man, and just an ordinary one at that.   Lilia had been married to one of the sons of the family.   The family is very upset to hear this and they send her brother in law to Italy to break up the relationship.   He arrives to late she has already married that man.   I do not wish to tell more of the plot action but there are some exciting and surprising developments.    The ending is quite tragic.  

For me the fun in this novel was in the characterizations of the Herriton's, the comments on the beauty of the Italian countryside and the wonderfully done conversations.    I also got a good feel for what Italy meant to the English.   There is considerable xenophobia in the actions of the Herritons.

Over all, I would say this is a good book, well written with a lot of wonderful lines.   I will, I hope go on to read his other novels and some of his short stories.   

Please share your experience with Forster with us.

Mel u

"The Story of a Panic" by E. M. Forster

"The Story of a Panic" by E. M. Forster (1903, 15 pages)

E. M. Forster (1879 to 1970-UK) is best known for two of his novels, Howard's End and A Passage to India.   (By coincidence,  I just saw the movie version of A Passage to India last week on cable TV).   Forster inherited at an early age enough funds from his father to free him from the necessity to work and was enabled by this to become a writer.    He attended Cambridge and was  active in the Bloomsbury social circle.    He lived in India for a period of time.    He is a GLBT author.   He attended the funeral of Katherine Mansfield in Paris and was a friend of Elizabeth Bowen.  

Forster's work is not yet in the public domain so I have not been able to find any of his short stories online.   I was very happy when I saw his "The Story of a Panic" was included in a 1947 collection of short stories a family member recently gave me.    Short stories are, among other things, a good way to "try out" a writer to see if you might enjoy one of their longer works.   Based on my first reading of "The Story of a Panic" I would say I would for sure enjoy one of his novels.    The story is not at all in a modern mode in the way in which a story by Katherine Mansfield or Virginia Woolf might be considered.    "The Story of a Panic" is Forster's first  published short story.  

"The Story of a Panic" by E. M. Forster is set among a group of British travelers on holiday in Italy.    (Italians may not like how they are characterized in this story.)    The travelers see the Italian country side as exotic and it brings back to them a sense of the old Roman Gods and mythological figures.    Everything is going smoothly until a "wild boy" bursts  on the scene and causes a panic among the travelers.   Is he a daemonic force or is simply a rude ill mannered country lad?     "The Story of a Panic" inspired by an trip Forster made to the Italian country.    Even without knowing anything about Forster's background as a GLBT author it is hard not to sense in this story that part of the panic created by the wild boy who some of the travelers say is Pan  is really a fear that one is sexually attracted to someone  who conventional society says one should not be.   This appears to be very much a story about awaking sexual self awareness.

"The Story of a Panic" by E. M. Forster is a traditionally told story.   I enjoyed everything about it.      I would happily read more of his stories and hope to read  A Passage to India soon.  


Mel u