The Importance of E. M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel

Abstract

E. M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel (1927) remains a cornerstone of Anglo-American novel criticism. Forster’s study helped define the values and questions with which we have approached novels for the past several decades. Moreover, today, it still addresses the crucial questions that concern us about form, point of view, and the relationship between art and life. While acknowledging the importance of Percy Lubbock’s The Craft of Fiction (1921) in extending the James aesthetic, the brilliance of Virginia Woolf’s insights in her essays in The Common Reader (1925) and elsewhere, and the usefulness of Edwin Muir’s The Structure of the Novel (1928), I believe that Forster’s book is the one of these 1920s books on the novel to which we most frequently return to learn about how novels mean and why they matter to us. Aspects of the Novel is informed not merely by the living experience of Forster’s having written novels throughout his adult life but, more importantly, by judgment, perspicacity, and erudition. To be sure, he does not articulate what we now think of as a theory, and he lacks the dialectical and polemical edge of recent criticism. Thus he disarmingly explains that he has chosen the term ‘aspects’, ‘because it means both the different ways we can look at a novel and the different ways a novelist can look at his work’ (p. 24).¹ In the early chapters, Forster begins with such traditional aspects as ‘story’, ‘people’, and ‘plot’ before turning in the later ones to less conventional ones such as ‘fantasy’, ‘prophecy’, ‘pattern’, and ‘rhythm’.