Context
Edward Morgan Forster was born in London in 1879.
His father, an architect, died when Forster was very
young, and he was raised by his mother and a great
aunt. A bright student, Forster attended Cambridge
University, from which he graduated in 1901. He
spent much of the next decade traveling and living
abroad. Many of his observations and experiences from
this time were later revived in his fiction, most
notably A Room with a View
(1908), which chronicles the experiences of a group
of English people vacationing in Italy, and A
Passage to India (1924), which
focuses on the racial misunderstandings and cultural
hypocrisies that characterized the complex
interactions between the Indians and the English
toward the end of the British occupation of India.
In 1910, Forster achieved his first major literary
success with Howards End, considered by many
critics to be his greatest novel. A symbolic
exploration of the social, economic, and
philosophical forces at work in England in the years
before World War I, Howards
End uses three families (the Schlegels, the Wilcoxes,
and the Basts) to explore the competing idealism and
materialism of the upper classes, and to explore the
belittling effects of poverty on the human soul. A deft
treatment of a large theme, Howards End won
widespread acclaim upon its original publication, and
established Forster as one of England's most
important writers--a reputation he would hold for the
rest of his life, though after 1924 he lived for
46 years and never wrote another novel.
Forster's style is marked by his sympathy for his
characters, his ability to see more than one side of
a single story, and his fondness for simple, symbolic
stories that neatly encapsulate large-scale problems
and conditions. These tendencies are all evident in
Howards End, which also features a highly
nuanced exploration of gender relations in the post-Victorian era.
After completing A Passage to India, Forster's
output decreased, and he mostly contented himself
with writing critical essays. In 1946, he accepted a
fellowship at Cambridge University; he remained in
Cambridge until his death in 1970.
