Where to Start with E.M. Forster: A Reading Guide

E.M. Forster (1879–1970) is one of the most beloved of the great Edwardian and early twentieth-century English novelists — a writer whose fiction combines social comedy with genuine moral seriousness, whose famous instruction to ‘only connect’ remains one of the most usable ethical prescriptions in literature, and whose four major novels contain some of the most memorable characters and scenes in English fiction. He wrote only five novels in his lifetime (and one published posthumously), but each has endured; A Passage to India is among the most important English novels about empire.

Where to Start: A Room with a View (1908)

The most immediately enjoyable Forster — and the right starting point for readers new to his work. Lucy Honeychurch, a young English woman from Surrey, is visiting Florence with her elderly cousin Charlotte when she meets the Emersons — George, young and unconventional, and his father, who holds progressive views that Charlotte finds alarming. When Lucy witnesses a stabbing in the Piazza della Signoria and George catches her as she faints, something begins between them that the conventions of their world require to be suppressed. Back in England, engaged to the appropriate Cecil Vyse, Lucy must eventually choose between the life convention has arranged for her and the life that George represents.

The novel is Forster’s most purely comic — warm, sunny, and built around a clear opposition between Italian freedom and English convention. The Merchant Ivory film (1985) is one of the finest adaptations of any English novel.

Howards End (1910)

Forster’s most ambitious novel — a panoramic account of Edwardian England through the relationships between three families. The Schlegel sisters, Margaret and Helen, represent the cultivated, liberal, humanist tradition of upper-middle-class England; the Wilcoxes, led by the businessman Henry Wilcox, represent the practical, imperial, and emotionally unavailable England that actually runs the country; and Leonard Bast, a working-class young man trying to improve himself through culture, represents the England that gets damaged by the collision between the other two.

The novel is a sustained inquiry into how England can ‘connect’ these separate worlds — Margaret’s marriage to Henry Wilcox and the inheritance of Howards End become the vehicle for Forster’s most direct engagement with the question of who England belongs to and on what terms. The 1992 Merchant Ivory film is excellent.

A Passage to India (1924)

Forster’s most politically serious and most formally complex novel — and the one that established his lasting reputation. Set in an unnamed Indian city under British rule (clearly modeled on Chandrapore/Bhopal), the novel follows Aziz, a Muslim Indian doctor, through his friendship with Mrs. Moore and his misadventure with Adela Quested at the Marabar Caves. The novel refuses to say definitively what happened in the caves; its ambiguity is the vehicle for Forster’s argument that the imperial relationship makes genuine understanding between English and Indian impossible.

A Passage to India is Forster’s deepest engagement with the question of whether human connection is possible across the barrier of power — and his most honest answer is that it may not be, or not fully. David Lean’s 1984 film is beautiful and intelligent.

Reading E.M. Forster

Forster’s central quality is his combination of moral seriousness and comic lightness — his ability to make a point about justice, class, and colonialism through characters who are also genuinely funny and genuinely warm. His prose is clear, his irony is light, and his sympathy for his characters is evident even when he is judging them. Begin with A Room with a View for the most immediately pleasurable novel; proceed to Howards End for the fullest social vision; read A Passage to India last, as the darkest and most politically serious. All three reward rereading.