E. M. Forster’s First Novel

Abstract

Two months after the appearance of Euphrosyne William Blackwood and Sons of Edinburgh and London published E. M. Forster’s first novel, Where Angels Fear to Tread. The beginnings of Forster’s early novels are all intertwined. The first one that was published in 1905 was actually Forster’s third attempt at a novel. Earlier he had written fragmentary drafts of the Italian and English halves of his The Lucy Novels which eventually became A Room with a View in 1908, the year after Forster’s second novel, The Longest Journey, appeared. And while still at Cambridge in 1899, Forster had started a novel that was abandoned two years later in Italy for the first of the Lucy drafts, and this in turn was dropped for Where Angels Fear to Tread, or Monteriano as it was originally called.