EM Forster

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Doctor honoris causa in Leiden (1954)
Dora Carrington : Portrait EM Forster, 1924/25

Edward Morgan Forster OM , CH (born January 1, 1879 in Marylebone , London , † June 7, 1970 in Coventry ) was a British author and temporarily member of the Bloomsbury Group . He became famous for his social novels like Reunion in Howards End , Room with a View and In Search of India , which dealt with class differences, hypocrisy and social rules. In addition, he wrote stories, essays, literary reviews and librettos .

Life

First half of life

Edward Morgan Forster was the only son of the architect Edward Morgan Llewellyn Forster , who died of tuberculosis a year and a half after Forster was born. Forster's childhood and much of his adult life were dominated by his mother, Anne Clara Whichelo Forster (1855–1945), and his aunts. Among them was his influential great-aunt and patroness Marianne Thornton , who bequeathed him £ 8,000 as a bequest in Trust in 1887 . He first attended Tonbridge School, where he suffered greatly from the cruelty of his classmates .

From 1897 to 1901 studied Forster at King's College of the University of Cambridge . There he joined the elite Cambridge Apostles secret society , of whose members, among others, Roger Fry , John Maynard Keynes , Lytton Strachey and Leonard Woolf joined forces to form the Bloomsbury Group , of which Forster was a member in the 1920s and 1930s.

After graduation, he traveled with his mother to Italy and Greece and on his return began to write essays and short stories for the liberal Independent Review. In 1905 Forster spent several months on the Nassenheide estate in Pomerania in what is now Poland as a private tutor for the four children of Countess Elizabeth von Arnim-Schlagenthin .

His first novel, Where Angels Fear to Tread, appeared in 1905. The following year he lectured on Italian art and history on the Cambridge Local Lectures Board. The Longest Journey appeared in 1907, followed by A Room with a View (1908), which is based in part on Forster's memories and experiences from his extensive trips to Italy. During the pre-war years, Forster also wrote several short stories that were published in The Celestial Omnibus (1911).

After Howards End (1910), which dealt with the subjects of money, business and culture, Forster began a new novel that dealt with a taboo subject at the time: homosexuality . Maurice was created in 1913/1914, was revised several times by Forster and only published posthumously in 1971.

Forster traveled to India in 1912/1913 and then worked for the National Gallery in London until 1915 . He joined the British Red Cross after the First World War and served in Egypt (Alexandria).

Forster returned to India in 1921, where he worked as a private secretary for the Maharaja of Dewas Senior. His last novel and masterpiece A Passage to India (1924), a portrait of the country under British rule, is also set in India .

After A Passage to India

Forster did not complete another novel after A Passage to India - the fragment Arctic Summer , in which he followed motifs from his early work, appeared only posthumously. Forster himself gave various reasons for his silence as a novelist - he had no longer found any original material and his subjects had fallen more and more out of time. Other critics speculate that Forster's secrecy about his homosexuality prevented him from putting experiences and topics that were really close to his heart on paper.

Forster later wrote two more biographies: Goldsworthy Lowes Dickenson (1934) and Marianne Thornton, 1797–1887. A Domestic Biography (1956) about his great-aunt Marianne Thornton . The essay collections Abinger Harvest and Two Cheers for Democracy appeared in 1936 and 1951, The Hill of Devi, an annotated report on his observations in India in the years 1912–1913 and in 1921, 1953. Only posthumously did a collection of short stories with predominantly homosexual subjects appear, The Life to Come (1972).

Forster wrote reviews and essays for numerous magazines, e.g. B. for the listener, and was an active PEN member. In 1934 he became the first president of the National Council for Civil Liberties, in 1945 an honorary member of King's College, where he lived until his death.

As a staunch democrat, Forster refused to be knighted in 1949. In the same year he was accepted as an honorary foreign member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters . In 1953 he was named Companion of Honor ; In 1958 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . In 1969 he accepted the British Order of Merit .

Forster was homosexual - open to close friends but not to the public - and remained a bachelor. He had a lifelong relationship with Bob Buckingham (1904–1975), a married police officer.

His sentence was also known in German-speaking countries: "How can I know what I am thinking before I hear what I am saying?"

Works

  • Where Angels Fear to Tread (novel, 1905; Eng. Angels and fools, 1948)
  • The Longest Journey (novel, 1907)
  • A Room with a View (Roman, 1908; Ger.Zimmer mit Aussicht , 1986)
  • The Machine Stops (story, 1909; Eng. The machine stands still , 2016)
  • Howards End (novel, 1910; German reunion in Howards End , 1949)
  • A Passage to India (novel, 1924; German India, 1932; in search of India , 1980)
  • Aspects of the Novel (study, 1927; German views of the novel, 1949)
  • Maurice (Roman, ed. 1971; German 1988)
  • Arctic Summer (novel fragment, ed. 1980)

Film adaptations

literature

Essays

  • Lars Kleiber: The art of living in EM Forster's “Howard's End” and Zadie Smith ’s “On beauty” . In: Anna-Margaretha Horatschek (Hrsg.): Literature and the art of living . Reflections on the Good Life in the British Novel from Victorianism to Postmodernism . WVT, Trier 2008, pp. 197-218, ISBN 978-3-86821-006-4 .
  • Thomas Le Blanc : Paradise and other machines. EM Forster "The machine stops" . In: Ders: (Ed.): Glaubenswelten. Gods in Science Fiction and Phantasy (= writings and materials from the Fantastic Library Wetzlar. Vol. 88). Verlag der PBW, Wetzlar 2005, pp. 101-106.
  • Ralph Pordzik: Snares that cannot fail. "Critical" tourism and the response to modernity in EM Forster's "A room with view" . In: Ders .: The wonder of travel. Fiction tourism and the social construction of the nostalgic (= Anglistische Forschungen. Vol. 344). Winter, Heidelberg 2005, pp. 107-122, ISBN 3-8253-5041-X .

Monographs

  • John Arlott et al. a. (Ed.): Aspects of EM Forster. Essays and recollections written for his 90th birthday January 1, 1969 . Arnold Books, London 1969.
  • Richard Canning: Letter lives. EM Forster . Hesperus Press, London 2009, ISBN 978-1-84391-916-2 .
  • GK Das (Ed.): EM Forster. A human exploration. Centenary essays . Macmillan, London 1979, ISBN 0-333-25775-8 .
  • Earl G. Ingersoll: Filming Forster. The challenges in adapting EM Forster's novels for the screen . University Press, Madison, NJ 2012, ISBN 978-1-61147-517-3 .
  • Wendy Moffat: EM Moffat. A new life . Bloomsbury Publ., London 2011, ISBN 978-1-4088-0961-7 .
  • Nicholas Royle : EM Forster . British Council / Northcote House, Plymouth 1999.
  • Sogos, Sofia, Nature and Mystery in Edward Morgan Forster's Tales , Giorgia Sogos (Ed.), Free Pen Verlag, Bonn 2018, ISBN 978-3-945177-61-7 .

Novel biography

Web links

Commons : EM Forster  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ After converting historical currency amounts into current purchasing power, this amount corresponds to around £ 869,000 today.
  2. ^ A Chronology of Forster's life and work . Cambridge.org. December 1, 1953. Retrieved December 21, 2018.
  3. ^ R. Scully: British Images of Germany: Admiration, Antagonism & Ambivalence, 1860-1914 . Springer, 2012, ISBN 978-1-137-28346-7 , pp. 120 ( google.de [accessed on January 6, 2019]).
  4. ↑ Stape, JH (John Henry): EM Forster: interviews and recollections . St. Martin's Press, New York 1993, ISBN 0-312-07961-3 .
  5. ↑ Bradshaw, David, 1955-: The Cambridge companion to EM Forster . 1st ed. Cambridge 2007, ISBN 978-0-521-83475-9 .
  6. ^ Honorary Members: EM Forster. American Academy of Arts and Letters, accessed March 10, 2019 .
  7. ^ Britain Unlimited Biography . Britainunlimited.com. June 7, 1970. Retrieved August 21, 2010.
  8. ^ Richard Brooks: Sex Led to EM Forster's End . In: The Times , June 6, 2010. 
personal data
SURNAME Forster, EM
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Forster, Edward Morgan
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British writer
DATE OF BIRTH January 1, 1879
PLACE OF BIRTH London
DATE OF DEATH June 7, 1970
Place of death Coventry