Forster was principally an Edwardian novelist concerned with the restrictions placed on personal freedom by English sensibilities, but his later work, especially his last novel, A Passage to India (1924), can be called Modernist in its use of symbolism and its style of repetition-with-variation (which Forster called “rhythm” in his 1927 book on fiction Aspects of the Novel). Forster, who lived most of his later life at King's College, Cambridge, was one of the less prominent figures in the Bloomsbury Group, a lifelong member of the Labour Party, and an agnostic. He was also an avowed liberal humanist who believed strongly in personal relationships: he famously wrote in “What I Believe” in 1939 that he would sooner betray h

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First published 08 January 2001

Citation: Childs, Peter. "E. M. Forster". The Literary Encyclopedia. 8 January 2001.
[http://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=5178, accessed 9 February 2010.]