E.M. Forster's "Aspects of the Novel," originally a series of lectures delivered at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1927, is a conversational, insightful discussion of plot, characters, rhythm and other components of the novel. Forster's humility -- mocking his own abilities as a critic, poking fun at his attachment to the book "The Swiss Family Robinson," and occasionally alluding to the ramshackle nature of the lectures -- is particularly winning.

The lectures purposely avoid looking at the development of the novel or how it's affected by historical events, and instead consider all novels on equal footing, imagining novelists from different periods writing at the same time in one large room. The lectures are filled with humor and frequently go beyond the novel itself to talk about other aspects of life.

If "Aspects" has a weakness, it's in its "Fantasy" and "Prophecy" lectures, which Forster himself admits are looser and lack the formality of the book's other chapters. The "Prophecy" section is particularly problematic because Forster himself says he's able to identify only four novelists (Dostoevsky, Melville, D.H. Lawrence and Emily Bronte) that illustrate the ideas in his lecture. It's still an interesting lecture, but weaker than the others.

The particularly noteworthy parts of "Aspects" are those in which Forster turns his attention to novelists who at the time were his contemporaries -- Joyce, Woolf, Gide and Proust among them -- and now are considered among the greats.

This rather strange book, a series of chatty and informal lectures Forster delivered at his alma mater Cambridge in 1927, owes its fame to two simple but indispensable concepts that have become almost axiomatic to the study of fiction and the craft of fiction writing.

Forster's first famous idea is the distinction between round and flat characters—in other words, characters who have a multitude of traits that make them seem three-dimensional, on the one hand, and characters defined by a single trait, on the other. Forster allows that great novelists from Dickens to Proust use flat characters and that they have two chief advantages over round characters: they are recognizable, and they are memorable. But he also implies that creating round characters takes greater art, which he shows through an example drawn from Austen's Mansfield Park in which a minor comic figure deals with an unexpected event both unpredictably but (given what we know of her personality) aptly, going from flat to round and back again. "How Jane Austen can write!" Forster exclaims. Round characters, then, are the higher achievement—though Forster does wryly remark that "Russian novels" (he has in mind Tolstoy and Dostoevsky) could use fewer of them, presumably for ease of reading.

Forster's second influential concept is the distinction between story and plot. The basic division is simple enough: a story is a series of fictional events in their temporal sequence, while a plot is the recitation of those events, in or out of sequence, with an emphasis on causality. Forster's famous illustration of the principle:

“The king died and then the queen died,” is a story. “The king died, and then the queen died of grief” is a plot. The time-sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it. Or again: “The queen died, no one knew why, until it was discovered that it was through grief at the death of the king.” This is a plot with a mystery in it, a form capable of high development. It suspends the time-sequence, it moves as far away from the story as its limitations will allow. Consider the death of the queen. If it is in a story we say “and then?” If it is in a plot we ask “why?”

This, too, is not just a scientific-seeming narratological observation, like the Russian Formalists' similar but more neutral distinction between fabula and syuzhet, formulated around the same time. For Forster, story is a low form that caters to the base instinct of curiosity, rather than drawing on memory and intelligence, which he deems necessary to understand a proper plot. He emphasizes this judgment by tracing story back to "neolithic times, perhaps to paleolithic" and finding its more recent votaries in cave men's "modern descendant the movie-public."

These ideas are now so familiar that they feel like second nature—I think even middle schoolers know the flat/round distinction at least—so why do I describe this as a strange book?

For one thing, there is its tone. Disclaiming the status of scholar, Forster instead adopts that humble, good-natured, common-sensical, and even somewhat bumbling English persona that so genially narrates his fiction. Forster's goal is transparency. He understands that his class of educated managers often pretends to an intellectual status it hasn't earned:

True scholarship is incommunicable, true scholars rare. There are a few scholars, actual or potential, in the audience today, but only a few, and there is certainly none on the platform. Most of us are pseudo-scholars, and I want to consider our characteristics with sympathy and respect, for we are a very large and quite a powerful class, eminent in Church and State, we control the education of the Empire, we lend to the Press such distinction as it consents to receive, and we are a welcome asset at dinner-parties.

Forster's title is meant to reflect the intellectual humility of the mere reader-practitioner, as opposed to the scholar. He declines to devise a definition of the novel no more precise than "[a]ny fictitious prose work over 50,000 words" and sees this art form, younger and less formed than prior literary genres, as a boggy tract between the solider mountains of poetry and history. He goes on:

And I have chosen the title “Aspects” because it is unscientific and vague, because it leaves us the maximum of freedom, because it means both the different ways we can look at a novel and the different ways a novelist can look at his work. And the aspects selected for discussion are seven in number: The Story; People; The Plot; Fantasy; Prophecy; Pattern and Rhythm.

His first anti-scholarly gesture is to dismiss literary history, perhaps the most academic approach to literature this side of linguistics, and treat the novelists of the previous 200 years as existing more or less simultaneously, on the grounds that a couple of centuries is not enough time for human nature to change fundamentally. He asks us to imagine "all the novelists writing their novels at once," and brilliantly demonstrates the irrelevance of periodization by pairing comparable passages from writers who differ in epoch and -ism while, more importantly, sharing a sensibility and aesthetic: Samuel Richardson and Henry James, Charles Dickens and H. G. Wells, Laurence Sterne and Virginia Woolf.

The highlights of the succeeding lectures, one on "Story," two on "People," and one on "Plot," are the celebrated distinctions between story and plot and between round and flat characters summarized above. But they have their local pleasures, too: Forster's reluctant praise of Walter Scott (whose work he regards as a relic of his grandparents' generation) for mastering the lowly art of storytelling; his much less ambivalent praise of Defoe for creating a character as life-like and lively as Moll Flanders ("She fills the book that bears her name, or rather stands alone in it, like a tree in a park"); his aforementioned admiration for the subtle artistry of Jane Austen; and a comparison between George Meredith ("not the great name he was twenty or thirty years ago, when much of the universe and all Cambridge trembled") and Thomas Hardy, which comes out in Hardy's favor ("a writer who is far greater than Meredith, and yet less successful as a novelist"), despite what Forster sees as Meredith's greater skill at plot and characterization.

Forster begins his book with the "unpatriotic truth" that no English novelist "is as great as Tolstoy," "has explored man’s soul as deeply as Dostoevsky," or "has analysed the modern consciousness as successfully as Marcel Proust," but his chapters on the technical matters of story and character tend to assume the standard of English realism: "all novels contain tables and chairs, and most readers of fiction look for them first." The next three chapters, by contrast—and here is another strange quality of Aspects—focus less on technique and more on moods and modes. They introduce foreign elements, foreign even when embodied by English novelists like Emily Brontë and D. H. Lawrence.

These unnovelistic aspects of the novel are "fantasy," "prophecy," and "pattern." Fantasy, which Forster associates with writers like Sterne, Woolf, and Joyce, includes everything from what was once called "romance" (explicitly supernatural and unreal narratives) to subjective experimental narration to fictions built on the irrealist basis of parody. That fantasy makes Forster uneasy can be shown in his reading of Ulysses ("the most interesting literary experiment of our day") as "a dogged attempt to cover the universe with mud," "the aim of which is to degrade all things and more particularly civilization and art,by turning them inside out and upside down"—a malicious fantasy of a profane quotidian, a vicious parody of English realism's milder and more genial spirit. As for prophecy, Forster can hardly define it, and he can only name four prophets—Dostoevsky, Melville, Lawrence, and Emily Brontë—all of whom write novels of a mythic or Biblical stature that make metaphysical claims. Forster links prophecy, perhaps again thinking of premodern modes, with that not-very-novelistic quality of "song."

He is patently uncomfortable with the fantasts and the prophets, yet he's attracted to them, too, or else he wouldn't devote two slightly out-of-place lectures to them. And why should fantasy and prophecy discomfit the author of "The Story of a Panic" or the Marabar Caves episode in A Passage to India anyway? Maybe one purpose of Forster's slyly diffident critical voice is to incite suspicion, to invite investigation into what immoderate desire the modest tone conceals.

Forster is more straightforwardly opposed to what he calls "pattern," the attempt to produce beauty in narrative art through a too-highly-wrought form. His example here is Henry James, who requires "that most of human life has to disappear before he can do us a novel," and Forster goes so far as to take H. G. Wells's side in his famous dispute with James over the purpose of fiction:

It is this question of the rigid pattern: hour-glass or grand chain or converging lines of the cathedral or diverging lines of the Catherine wheel, or bed of Procrustes—whatever image you like as long as it implies unity. Can it be combined with the immense richness of material which life provides? Wells and James would agree it cannot, Wells would go on to say that life should be given the preference, and must not be whittled or distended for a pattern’s sake. My own prejudices are with Wells.

Despite his siding with Wells, though, and despite his devotion to English realism, Forster also—right in the middle of the book—declares an allegiance that puts him closer to the likes of Sterne, Woolf, and Joyce, to Romantic and modernist subjectivities as opposed to realist solidities, than he might otherwise seem to be:

“Character,” says Aristotle, “gives us qualities, but it is in actions—what we do—that we are happy or the reverse.” We have already decided that Aristotle is wrong and now we must face the consequences of disagreeing with him. “All human happiness and misery,” says Aristotle, “take the form of action.” We know better. We believe that happiness and misery exist in the secret life, which each of us leads privately and to which (in his characters) the novelist has access.

This belief that the inner life is the novelist's real quarry explains why Forster opts for the more indefinite term "rhythm" instead of "pattern" when he comes to define where beauty in the novel might reside. His conveniently musical example is Vinteuil's recurrent "little phrase" in Proust: the idea is that a novel should not be so rigidly designed that it has to exclude the variety and diversity of life, but rather that novels seeking to hold this vital chaos should be "stitched internally" by the repetition and variation of motifs that are introduced and then revisited at intervals. He cautions that this stitching must remain loose to be effective—as loose, we might say, as Forster's own perusal of the novel's aspects:

I doubt that it can be achieved by the writers who plan their books beforehand, it has to depend on a local impulse when the right interval is reached. But the effect can be exquisite, it can be obtained without mutilating the characters, and it lessens our need of an external form.

The subtle jab against the "planners" of the literary world speaks up for the novel as an organic rather than an artificial form, this in keeping with what I have elsewhere discussed as Forster's "green world" Romantic naturalism.

In a brief conclusion, Forster suggests that the novel as a form, considered historically, tracks ideas of human nature: "the phrase 'the development of the novel' might cease to be a pseudo-scholarly tag or a technical triviality, and become important, because it implied the development of humanity." Contemporary theorists of the novel have caught up with this idea, for better and for worse, and it's tempting to wonder what Forster might think of today's departures from the realism he seems (only seems?) to have held so dear.

Is Aspects of the Novel worth reading today? Like all other famous nonfiction books that introduced key ideas into the common sense of humanity, it is stranger, more singular and more complicated, than these ideas might suggest now that they've entered the dictionary or encyclopedia. Forster does rely on some outdated schemata—his notion of story as primitive relies on a cultural Darwinism that would now read, at least by implication, as offensive—and some now-obscure examples, as when, in his lecture on fantasy, he quotes at great length some long-forgotten "book about a witch: Flecker's Magic, by Norman Matson." But his thoughts on more resolutely canonical authors, like Defoe, Austen, Melville, and James, are intelligent and often counterintuitive—good to quarrel with, which alone makes Aspects of the Novel enjoyable as an insight into one major or near-major novelist's reflections on his peers.

Above all, though, we can't afford to neglect books whose ideas went from the wisdom of Cambridge to every high-school textbook: they are the building-blocks of our world, and if we want to change our world or preserve it, we have to know what's it made of.

This was a fascinating breakdown on what Forster thought a novel should be/have. I enjoyed it quite a bit, and ended up highlighting large sections. There were things I didn't completely agree with but on the whole I liked what he had to say.

This collection of lectures Forster gave at Cambridge Univ in 1927 is published in book form and provides a decent look at how a novelist of some critical acclaim a century ago viewed the Aspects of the Novel, both from a reader's and a writer's perspective.

Forster defines the novel as "any fictitious prose work over 50,000 words." The seven aspects he discusses are story, people, plot, fantasy, prophecy, pattern, and rhythm. He compares the novel's texture and form to those of a symphony and believes the novel should "reveal the hidden life at its source" since a novelist's necessary preoccupation, in his view, is human nature.

I'd love to read his view on the works of Wm. Faulkner, who said, in accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950 that "the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat."

This book seems useful for considering structure and texture in writing a novel. For that purpose, I'd recommend it. For anyone else, I suggest, instead, reading his 1908 novel "A Room with a View" (his most optimistic novel).

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Forster is amazingly talented novelist and critic.

I’ve been hearing about this wonderful book for a long time before FINALLY managing to read it. And I consider myself lucky!

I think this book is a must-read for everyone who is interested in literature. Forster’s language and sense of humor is fascinating.

Loved it.

Aspects of the Novel by E.M. Forster is not a how-to-write book. It is a collection of lectures delivered in the 1920's by Forster at King's College in Cambridge. The point of the book is to discuss what makes a good fiction novel work. I was introduced to this book from multiple directions at the same time. The primary place that piqued my curiosity was in Ursula Le Guin's Steering the Craft where she used it as a debate partner. I am thrilled I did read it, and I think there is a good reason why it is considered a classic. Sorry, Ms. Le Guin!

Forster breaks down the novel into its various parts: Story, People, Plot, Fantasy, Prophecy, and Pattern/Rhythm. Most of the sections are obvious on what it covers, but it still has profound insights into story vs. plot, flat characters usefulness as supporting characters, and what makes an excellent round character.

As a fantasy fiction writer, I was curious about his sections on Fantasy and Prophecy. I was amazed to see that this had nothing to do with myth or fairy tales. A novel like Moby Dick would have both fantasy and prophecy according to his definition. He discusses the fact that fantasy always requires that we pay something extra, going beyond the norm and mundane. Prophecy asks for humility and a suspension of the sense of humor because it makes us feel and sense beyond what can be articulated.

His chapter on prophecy seemed especially pertinent to Christian fiction writers. He shows and explains the difference between preaching and feeling the truth through abstraction. As a writer, I can have a character dream and then tell them what it means and how to feel about it. Or, as a writer, I can have my character dream and then have that dream alter them without explaining to the reader why. This second option is what Forester calls prophesy. We can preach a message is our story explicitly in dialogue, or we could follow St. Francis of Assisi's advice to preach always and only use words when necessary. 

I found myself stretched and excited by Forster's insights. I highly recommend this book to everyone, even if you aren't a writer. Learning to read closely is a skill that all can benefit from and to see beyond an action-packed plot can produce great rewards.

Politely sarcastic, I would call this. Lots of enlightening truths about writing a novel mixed in with quiet jabs at societal conventions blown up in novels to startling proportions, like eating, for example, and the fact that most novels end in death or marriage, all of this illustrated with examples from English novels of the last two centuries, with a mention of some French and some Russian giants like Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. In that way, it's a limited but quite accurate view on what a novel is, but unless you've read the classics being discussed here, most of the findings will fall on your deaf ears. If nothing else, read the part about the plot, it's worth it.

As much as I absolutely love some of Forster’s novels, there was something about this book which failed to reach me entirely. In about half of it, he was lucid and original, using text examples that I knew, and lifting their meanings to new heights; introducing his famous ‘flat’ and ‘round’ characters. But in the other half (or so), I felt that he was unnecessarily allegorical and metaphysical, and he lost me at times.

The book is divided into chapters about The Story, People, The Plot, Fantasy, Prophecy, Pattern and Rhythm, which provide Forster’s analysis of, of course, the foremost aspects of novels. As literary criticism or an elucidation of the qualities a reader must bring to the appreciation of books, it gives an overall feeling of something which is almost spiritual, certainly aesthetic, almost slightly out of one’s grasp. As an illustration of the elements of the craft of novel writing, there isn’t much in concrete terms, but this is Forster’s style. His is a hazy, dreamy, yet astute perception of the art of the novel, and he doesn’t hesitate – along the way – to pass judgment on some of the grandest names of his trade, including Scott, Dickens and James, which was rather entertaining, certainly illuminating.

He employs a majestic ‘we’, which rather irritated me sometimes, signaling some kind of collusion when saying ‘we all consider this novel so and so.’ The overall tone is quaint, yet casual, witty but opinionated, and I would have loved being in attendance when he gave these lectures, and being the annoying person in the audience who asked all the stupid questions (‘So are you really saying that James’s characters are dead?’ would perhaps be what I’d start out with).

Gonna quote Forster whenever someone disagrees with me from now on ("I see the soundness of this argument, but my heart refuses to assent.").

It's been a while since I dove into any literary criticism, but I saw this and it took my fancy. It's a neat collection of a series of lectures that Forster gave in 1927. His unusual take on the novel includes disregarding period and chronological context. He treats all novels and all authors as if they are sitting in the room at the same time. This means he freely compares the great novels of the 18th century with Austen, Bronte and Dickens while also referencing Ulysses by James Joyce which had been published in Paris in 1922 but was unavailable at that time either in the UK or the US.

He's great on the different ways novels are put together and merciless on Henry James. That's enough to get a thumbs up from me.

I really hoped to get a lot more out of this book, but I spent most of my time thinking, ‘What are you talking about?’ It’s hard to find many lucid bits.

For example, in the segment called Pattern and Rhythm:

‘The longer [Henry] James worked, the more convinced he grew that a novel should be a whole not necessarily geometric like The Ambassadors, but it should accrete round a single topic, situation, gesture, which should occupy the characters and provide a plot, and should also fasten up the novel on the outside - catch its scattered statements in a net, make them cohere like a planet, and swing through the skies of memory. A pattern must emerge, and anything that emerged from the pattern must be pruned off as wanton distraction. Who so wanton as human beings? Put Tom Jones or Emma or even Mr Casaubon into a Henry James book, and the book will burn to ashes, whereas we could put them into one another's books and only cause local inflammation. Only a Henry James character will suit, and though they are not dead - certain selected recesses of experience he explores very well - they are gutted of the common stuff that fills characters in other books, and ourselves. And this castrating is not in the interests of the Kingdom of Heaven, there is no philosophy in the novels, no religion (except an occasional touch of superstition), no prophecy, no benefit for the superhuman at all. It is for the sake of a particular aesthetic effect which is certainly gained, but at this heavy price.’

It would take me some time to even begin to decode that and Forster doesn’t go on to explain what he means. The whole book is lost is some strange poetry, when what you really want is plain speaking to help you understand how and why novels work. I didn’t get much insight. Perhaps it would have been easier to make sense of this if you were in the room when these lectures were being given, but I doubt it.

(Note: these lectures were delivered in 1927, so the book discusses 18th and 19th century novels and writers. They’re all very well known books and authors, but if you’re not into classics, that might make it even harder to follow the discussion.)

By the author’s own admission, “these are some lectures (the Clark Lectures) which were delivered under the auspices of Trinity College, Cambridge, in the spring of 1927.”

Using examples of archetypal works by many of the world’s paramount writers, he discusses seven facets he deems general to the novel: 1) story, 2) characters, 3) plot, 4) fantasy, 5) prophecy, 6) pattern, and 7) rhythm.

Forster cans the method of examining the novel as a historical development, in preference to an appearance of all novelists throughout history writing concurrently, side by side. He first establishes that, if nothing else, a novel is a narrative occurring over a period of time. He stresses the prominence of character, maintaining that both ‘‘flat’’ and ‘‘round’’ characters may be included in the popular novel.

He regards the inevitability of plot, which creates the consequence of suspense, as a pickle by which character is recurrently sacrificed in the service of providing an ending to the novel.

Fantasy and prophecy, which provide a logic of the ‘‘universal,’’ or spiritual, Forster regards as dominant aspects of the great novel. Lastly, he dismisses the value of ‘‘pattern,’’ by which a narrative may be structured, as another aspect that repeatedly sacrifices the liveliness of character.

Drawing on the metaphor of music, Forster concludes that rhythm, which he defines as ‘‘repetition plus variation,’’ allows for an aesthetically pleasing structure to emerge from the novel, while maintaining the integrity of character and the nonfiction writing, such as essays, literary criticism, and biography. In addition to Aspects of the Novel, two important essay collections were Abinger Harvest (1936) and Two Cheers for Democracy (1951).

In an exploratory chapter, Forster founds the rubrics for his argument of the English novel. He outlines the novel purely—according to M. Abel Chevalley in Le Roman Anglais de notre temps, as ‘‘a fiction in prose of a certain extent.’’ He goes on to delineate English literature as literature written in the English language, irrespective of the geographic setting or source of the author.

In a chapter on ‘‘The Story,’’ Forster begins with the proclamation that the novel, in its most basic definition, tells a story. He goes on to say that a story must be built around uncertainty—the question of ‘‘what happens next?’’ He thus defines the story as ‘‘a narrative of events arranged in their time sequence.’’

In two chapters entitled ‘‘People,’’ Forster discusses characterization in the novel. He describes five ‘‘main facts of human life,’’ which include ‘‘birth, food, sleep, love, and death,’’ and then compares these five activities as experienced by real people (homo sapiens) to these activities as enacted by characters in novels (homo fictus).

In a chapter on plot, Forster defines plot as a narrative of events over time, with an emphasis on causality. He claims that the understanding of plot requires two traits in the reader: intelligence and memory. In a chapter on fantasy, Forster asserts that two important aspects of the novel are fantasy and prophecy, both of which include an element of mythology.

Forster describes the aspect of prophecy in a novel as ‘‘a tone of voice’’ of the author, a ‘‘song’’ by which ‘‘his theme is the universe,’’ although his subject matter may be anything but universal. In a chapter on pattern and rhythm, Forster describes the aspect of pattern in the novel in terms of visual art. He describes the narrative pattern of Thaïs, by Anatole France, as that of an hourglass and the novel Roman Pictures, by Percy Lubbock, as that of a chain. He determines that pattern adds an aesthetic quality of beauty to a novel. He then turns to the aspect of rhythm, which he describes as ‘‘repetition plus variation,’’ as better suited to the novel than is pattern.

He describes the multi-volume novel Remembrance of Things Past, by Marcel Proust, as an example of the successful use of rhythm. Forster concludes that rhythm in the novel provides a more open-ended narrative structure without sacrificing character.

To quote Forster himself, the essays are “informal, indeed talkative, in their tone, and it seemed safer when presenting them in book form not to mitigate the talk, in case nothing should be left at all. Words such as ‘I’, ‘you’, ‘one’, ‘we’, ‘curiously enough’, ‘so to speak’, ‘only imagine’ and ‘of course’ will consequently occur on every page and will rightly distress the sensitive reader; but he is asked to remember that if these words were removed others, perhaps more distinguished, might escape through the orifices they left, and that since the novel is itself often colloquial it may possibly withhold some of its secrets from the graver and grander streams of criticism, and may reveal them to backwaters and shallows.”

After his death on June 7, 1970, in Coventry, England, his novel Maurice (1971) was published for the first time, speciously bottled-up by the author because of its first-person content vis-à-vis a young homosexual individual.