Life & Background
Edward Morgan Forster was born in London in 1879 and raised by his mother after his father's early death, with a legacy from a great-aunt that gave him financial independence. At King's College Cambridge he joined the Apostles and formed the friendships that connected him to the Bloomsbury Group. Travel in Italy and Greece supplied his early novels' contrast between English reticence and Mediterranean vitality. He visited India in 1912 and again in 1921, working as secretary to the Maharajah of Dewas, and those visits produced A Passage to India in 1924 — after which he published no further novels in his lifetime, though he lived another forty-six years. He was homosexual, wrote Maurice in 1913–14 and left it for posthumous publication, and spent his later decades as an essayist, broadcaster, and fellow of King's.
A Passage to India
Adela Quested travels to the Indian city of Chandrapore with Mrs Moore, intending to decide whether to marry Mrs Moore's son Ronny, the city magistrate. Wanting to see the real India, they meet Dr Aziz, a Muslim physician, through the schoolmaster Fielding. Aziz organises an expedition to the Marabar Caves. Inside a cave Mrs Moore is overwhelmed by an echo that reduces everything to meaninglessness; Adela, in another cave, believes she has been assaulted and accuses Aziz. The English community closes ranks, Fielding sides with Aziz and is ostracised, and at the trial Adela withdraws her accusation. Aziz is freed but embittered. Years later, in a princely state, he and Fielding ride together and try to be friends; the horses swerve apart, and the earth and sky say not yet, not there.
The novel is structured in three parts — Mosque, Caves, Temple — moving from social comedy to a void at the centre and then to a Hindu festival that offers a different, less rational kind of inclusion. The Marabar echo, which reduces all speech to the same meaningless sound, is the formal centre: the novel's liberal faith in personal relations, summarised in Forster's own epigraph 'only connect' from Howards End, is tested against something that cannot be dissolved by goodwill. Postcolonial criticism has read the book both as a serious critique of the Raj and, following Said, as a work whose sympathy remains structured by the assumptions of empire; the deliberate non-resolution of the ending is where that argument concentrates.
Why Forster Matters
Forster is the representative novelist of English liberal humanism and its limits, and A Passage to India is one of the most taught novels in postcolonial syllabi precisely because it is a sympathetic English account of colonial India that still cannot imagine equal friendship under empire. Aspects of the Novel remains a standard critical text, particularly its distinction between flat and round characters and its separation of story from plot. Maurice, published in 1971, gave a rare early English novel of homosexual love with an unpunished ending.
Key Facts
All Major Works
- Where Angels Fear to Tread1905
- A Room with a View1908
- Howards End1910
- A Passage to India1924
- Aspects of the Novel1927
- Maurice1971