‘Fresh Woods, and Pastures New’: Forster Criticism and Scholarship since 1975

Abstract

The publication of P. N. Furbank’s authorized E. M. Forster: A Life (London: Secker and Warburg, Vol I, 1977. Vol. II, 1978; 2 vols. in one, New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1978) and the large number of other books and essays written on Forster since 1975 indicate that interest in him continues unabated. The authors of these studies are convinced of Forster’s importance to his posterity, though the adulatory tone and the tendency, once noteworthy among his Indian disciples, to regard him as a saint have virtually disappeared. The impact, for better or for worse, of Furbank’s biography and of the posthumously published homosexual works has been to make us see Forster plain, and indeed, in a different light. His eminence as a novelist remains unassailed, it seems to me, whereas the new revelations about him and his newly published fiction have sometimes seemed to strengthen, and then sometimes to diminish, our conception of him as public presence, humanist sage and dedicated artist. Forster will undoubtedly occupy a place somewhat less august in the annals of contemporary literature than he did in the years 1945 to 1970, but it is safe to say that he will never sink to the obscurity that overtook him, in the period 1930 to 1943, as an important novelist.