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E. M. Forster: A Biography

nicola beauman

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E. M. Forster was one of the greatest novelists of the twentieth century, author of such acclaimed and much-loved books as A Room with a View, Howards End and A Passage to India. Yet in many ways his life has remained an enigma. Homosexual, deeply inhibited, a man who lived with his mother from the time he was born until her death when he was sixty-six, Forster nevertheless created a fictional world of abiding richness and fascination. It is this paradoxical relationship between Forster's life and his writings that Nicola Beauman explores here.
Born in 1879, Forster wrote his first novel in his mid-twenties, and by the time he was thirty-five had completed four more. Yet after he published his final novel ten years later, he never wrote another. Why Forster abandoned fiction, where the roots of his novels actually lay (among other discoveries, Nicola Beauman shows that Maurice, his posthumously published novel about homosexual love, was based on real events and real people), just how his experiences in India and Egypt and the suburbs of London shaped and colored his work - such are the issues that E. M. Forster brilliantly illuminates. It evokes Forster's lifelong obsession with houses, families and inherited traditions, and investigates the effects of his mother's stultifying grasp. And above all, it sympathetically examines, for the first time, the emotional and sexual frustrations that oppressed him well into middle age, and what they meant to his writing.

404 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1,1993

This edition

Format
404 pages, Hardcover
Published
March 29, 1994 by Knopf
ISBN
9780394583815
ASIN
0394583817
Language
English

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About the author

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nicola beauman

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Nicola Beauman is a British biographer and journalist, and the founder of Persephone Books, an independent book publisher based in Bath.

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Rating(4.2 / 5.0, 9 votes)
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9 reviews All reviews
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Pakutto
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 25,2025
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E.M.Forster presents a challenge to any biographer. He was not an easy man to know, even when he was alive and destroyed many of his more confidential papers. Fortunately, he lived long before electronic communications and was an assiduous letter-writer. Nicola Beaumann makes heavy use of these as well as sensitive interpretation of his novels but one feels she struggles at times to penetrate the inner man. A homosexual who never really came out although he had a long relationship in later life with Bob, who was married to a woman, Morgan wrote all his novels before he obtained sexual fulfilment with another person. Beaumann speculates about the influence of this situation on his work and underlines the heavy influence of his close relationship with his mother and his attachment to homes in the English countryside. Her struggles with her subject demonstrate the difficulties of the biographer's art, particularly the biography of a literary genius: how closely can life's circumstances be linked to and 'explain' the artist's work?
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derpKun
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 25,2025
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I really wanted to like this biography. Forster is a fascinating subject, and the author's empathy for him comes through clearly. Her merging of Forster's various texts with biographical details is not done as seamlessly as Hermione Lee did in her biography of Virginia Woolf. That and Claire Tomalin's biography of Jane Austen remain the pinnacles of literary biography, and I hope there will be one of Forster equally well done.
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Yautja
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 25,2025
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Made me very glad to be alive now and not back then.
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Amar_Dikli
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 25,2025
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Such an interesting, detailed study of EM Forster, I loved it. It made me feel very sad about the man, and look at his work with with new understanding. He was so clever in creating the relationships between men and women with their hopes and flaws, all the while he lacked the opportunity to have such experiences himself. The writing of his novels is closely explained and I'm now really enjoying rereading his work, starting with "Where Angels Fear To Tread".
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bitchysenpai
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 25,2025
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A novel take on his life: one that had clearly be missing in the literature but one could argue that it dominate the book and skewed the resulting biography too much.

Nevertheless a wonderful account of the times in which he lived from 30s to 60s: a fascinating life based on the production of a handful of books!
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LovelyTekki
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 25,2025
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It's hard to work out what is fact or fiction. Sometimes, there will be a reference to back up a statement, but often Beauman appears to create scenarios based on her opinion.

This isn't helped by the fact that some of these scenarios have not aged well.
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judarha
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 25,2025
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Not the typical biography, as the title suggests. Beauman calls E. M. Forster ‘Morgan’ all the way through, rather than Forster, because this is a very personal biography. Most of the book deals with the first half of Forster’s life, when he was writing his novels. The second half of his life only gets two or three chapters. That might be partly because Forster’s later journals weren’t available when this book was written, but I suspect that it was also because Beauman was most interested in Forster’s books; she sometimes writes about her own reactions to them, which I appreciated. What I wasn’t so sure about were the times when she claims to know what Forster was thinking or feeling: he must have thought this he would have felt that. I also struggled a little with Beauman referring to Forster as an ‘invert’. I know it’s a historically accurate term, but it’s not a pleasant one.

I must say if there’s been a biography written that uses Forster’s later journals. I’d love to know more about his later, happy, years, when he was in a long term same-sex relationship.
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