Edward Morgan Forster OM CH (1 de enero de 1879 - 7 de junio de 1970) fue un autor inglés . Es mejor conocido por sus novelas, en particular Una habitación con vistas (1908), Howards End (1910) y Un pasaje a la India (1924). También escribió numerosos cuentos, ensayos, discursos y retransmisiones, así como un número limitado de biografías y algunas obras de teatro . También fue coautor de la ópera Billy Budd (1951). Muchas de sus novelas examinan la diferencia de clases y la hipocresía . Sus puntos de vista como humanista están en el centro de su trabajo.
Considerado uno de los novelistas ingleses más exitosos de la era eduardiana , fue nominado al Premio Nobel de Literatura en 22 años distintos. [1] [2] Declinó el título de caballero en 1949, fue nombrado miembro de la Orden de los Compañeros de Honor en 1953 y en 1961 fue uno de los primeros cinco autores nombrados Compañero de Literatura por la Royal Society of Literatura .
Después de asistir a la Escuela Tonbridge , Forster estudió historia y clásicos en el King's College de Cambridge , donde conoció a futuros escritores como Lytton Strachey y Leonard Woolf . Luego viajó por toda Europa antes de publicar su primera novela, Donde los ángeles temen pisar , en 1905. Su última novela, Maurice , una historia de amor homosexual en la Inglaterra de principios del siglo XX, se publicó en 1971, un año después de su muerte.
Muchas de sus novelas fueron adaptadas póstumamente al cine, incluidas Merchant Ivory Productions de A Room with a View (1985), Maurice (1987) y Howards End (1992), dramas de época aclamados por la crítica que contaron con decorados lujosos y estimados actores británicos, incluida Helena. Bonham Carter , Daniel Day-Lewis , Hugh Grant , Anthony Hopkins y Emma Thompson . El director David Lean filmó otra adaptación bien recibida, Pasaje a la India , en 1984.
Forster, nacido en 6 Melcombe Place, Dorset Square , Londres NW1, que ya no existe, era hijo único de la angloirlandesa Alice Clara "Lily" (de soltera Whichelo) y un arquitecto galés, Edward Morgan Llewellyn Forster. Estaba registrado como Henry Morgan Forster, pero accidentalmente bautizó a Edward Morgan Forster. [3] Su padre murió de tuberculosis el 30 de octubre de 1880, antes del segundo cumpleaños de Forster. [4]
En 1883, él y su madre se mudaron a Rooks Nest , cerca de Stevenage , Hertfordshire , donde vivieron hasta 1893. Esto serviría de modelo para la casa Howards End en su novela del mismo nombre. Está incluido en el Grado I en la Lista del Patrimonio Nacional de Inglaterra por interés histórico y asociaciones literarias. [5] Forster tenía buenos recuerdos de su infancia en Rooks Nest. Continuó visitando la casa hasta finales de la década de 1940 y conservó los muebles toda su vida. [6] [7]
Entre los antepasados de Forster se encontraban miembros de la Secta Clapham , un grupo de reforma social de la Iglesia de Inglaterra . Forster heredó £ 8.000 (equivalente a £ 1.123.677 en 2023 [8] ) en fideicomiso de su tía abuela paterna Marianne Thornton (hija del abolicionista Henry Thornton ), quien murió el 5 de noviembre de 1887. [9] Esto fue suficiente para vivir y le permitió convertirse en escritor. Asistió como niño a la escuela Tonbridge en Kent, donde el teatro de la escuela lleva su nombre, [10] aunque se sabe que no estaba contento allí. [11]
En King's College, Cambridge, en 1897-1901, [12] se convirtió en miembro de una sociedad de debate conocida como los Apóstoles (formalmente Cambridge Conversazione Society). Se reunieron en secreto para discutir su trabajo sobre cuestiones filosóficas y morales. Muchos de sus miembros constituyeron lo que llegó a conocerse como el Grupo Bloomsbury , del que Forster fue miembro en las décadas de 1910 y 1920. Hay una famosa recreación del Cambridge de Forster al comienzo de El viaje más largo . Las hermanas Schlegel de Howards End se basan hasta cierto punto en Vanessa y Virginia Stephen. [13] Forster se graduó con una licenciatura con honores de segunda clase tanto en clásicos como en historia.
En 1904, Forster viajó a Grecia e Italia interesado en su herencia clásica. Luego buscó un puesto en Alemania para aprender el idioma y pasó varios meses en el verano de 1905 en Nassenheide, Pomerania (ahora el pueblo polaco de Rzędziny ) como tutor de los hijos de la escritora Elizabeth von Arnim . Escribió una breve memoria de esta experiencia, que fue uno de los momentos más felices de su vida. [14] [15]
En 1906, Forster se enamoró de Syed Ross Masood , un futuro estudiante indio de Oxford de 17 años al que dio clases de latín. Masood tenía una visión más romántica y poética de la amistad, confundiendo a Forster con confesiones de amor. [16] Después de dejar la universidad, Forster viajó por Europa con su madre. Luego se mudaron a Weybridge , Surrey , donde escribió sus seis novelas.
En 1914, visitó Egipto , Alemania y la India con el clasicista Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson , momento en el que ya había escrito todas sus novelas menos una. [17] Como objetor de conciencia en la Primera Guerra Mundial, Forster se desempeñó como jefe de búsqueda (de militares desaparecidos) para la Cruz Roja Británica en Alejandría , Egipto. [18] Aunque consciente de sus deseos reprimidos, fue sólo entonces, mientras estaba destinado en Egipto, que "perdió su R [respetabilidad]" ante un soldado herido en 1917. [19]
Forster spent a second spell in India in the early 1920s as private secretary to Tukojirao III, Maharajah of Dewas. The Hill of Devi is his non-fictional account of this period. After returning to London from India, he completed the last novel of his to be published in his lifetime, A Passage to India (1924), for which he won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction. He also edited the letters of Eliza Fay (1756–1816) from India, in an edition first published in 1925.[20] In 2012, Tim Leggatt, who knew Forster for his last 15 years, wrote a memoir based on unpublished correspondence with him over those years.[21]
Forster was awarded a Benson Medal in 1937. In the 1930s and 1940s Forster became a notable broadcaster on BBC Radio, and while George Orwell was the BBC India Section talks producer from 1941 to 1943, he commissioned from Forster a weekly book review.[22] Forster became publicly associated with the British Humanist Association. In addition to his broadcasting, he advocated individual liberty and penal reform and opposed censorship by writing articles, sitting on committees and signing letters.
Forster was open about his homosexuality to close friends, but not to the public. He never married, but had a number of male lovers during his adult life.[23] He developed a long-term relationship with Bob Buckingham (1904–1975), a married policeman, which lasted for 40 years.[24][25] Forster included Buckingham and his wife May in his circle, which included J. R. Ackerley, a writer and literary editor of The Listener, the psychologist W. J. H. Sprott, and for a time, the composer Benjamin Britten. Other writers with whom he associated included Christopher Isherwood, the poet Siegfried Sassoon, and the Belfast-based novelist Forrest Reid. He was a close friend of the socialist poet and philosopher Edward Carpenter. A visit to Carpenter and his younger lover George Merrill in 1913 inspired Forster's novel Maurice, which is partly based on them.[26]
In 1960, Forster began a relationship with the Bulgarian émigré Mattei Radev, a picture framer and art collector who moved in Bloomsbury group circles. He was Forster's junior by 46 years. They met at Long Crichel House, a Georgian rectory in Long Crichel, Dorset, a country retreat shared by Edward Sackville-West and the gallery-owner and artist Eardley Knollys.[27][28]
From 1925 until his mother's death at age 90 in March 1945, Forster lived with her at the house West Hackhurst in the village of Abinger Hammer, Surrey, finally leaving in September 1946.[29] His London base was 26 Brunswick Square from 1930 to 1939, after which he rented 9 Arlington Park Mansions in Chiswick until at least 1961.[30][31] After a fall in April 1961, he spent his final years in Cambridge at King's College.[32]
Forster was elected an honorary fellow of King's College in January 1946,[30] and lived for the most part in the college, doing relatively little. In April 1947 he arrived in America for a three-month nationwide tour of public readings and sightseeing, returning to the East Coast in June.[33] He declined a knighthood in 1949 and was made a Member of the Order of the Companions of Honour in 1953.[30] At age 82, he wrote his last short story, Little Imber, a science fiction tale. According to his friend Richard Marquand, Forster was critical of American foreign policy in his latter years, which was one reason he refused offers to adapt his novels for the screen, as Forster felt such productions would involve American financing.[34]
At 85 he went on a pilgrimage to the Wiltshire countryside that had inspired his favourite novel The Longest Journey, escorted by William Golding.[33] In 1961, he was one of the first five authors named as a Companion of Literature by the Royal Society of Literature.[35] In 1969, he was made a member of the Order of Merit. Forster died of a stroke on 7 June 1970 at the age of 91, at the Buckinghams' home in Coventry, Warwickshire.[36][30] His ashes, mingled with those of Buckingham, were later scattered in the rose garden of Coventry's crematorium, near Warwick University.[37][38]
Forster had five novels published in his lifetime. Although Maurice was published shortly after his death, it had been written nearly sixty years earlier. His first novel, Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), tells of Lilia, a young English widow who falls in love with an Italian, and of the efforts of her bourgeois relatives to get her back from Monteriano (based on San Gimignano). Philip Herriton's mission to retrieve her from Italy has features in common with that of Lambert Strether in Henry James's The Ambassadors. Forster discussed James' novel ironically and somewhat disapprovingly in his book Aspects of the Novel (1927). The novel was adapted as a 1991 film directed by Charles Sturridge, starring Helena Bonham Carter, Rupert Graves, Judy Davis and Helen Mirren.[39]
Next, Forster published The Longest Journey (1907), an inverted Bildungsroman following the lame Rickie Elliott from Cambridge to a career as a struggling writer and then a post as a schoolmaster, married to an unappealing Agnes Pembroke. In a series of scenes on the Wiltshire hills, which introduce Rickie's wild half-brother Stephen Wonham, Forster attempts a kind of sublime related to those of Thomas Hardy and D. H. Lawrence.
Forster's third novel, A Room with a View (1908), is his lightest and most optimistic. It was started in 1901, before any of his others, initially under the title Lucy. It explores young Lucy Honeychurch's trip to Italy with a cousin, and the choice she must make between the free-thinking George Emerson and the repressed aesthete Cecil Vyse. George's father Mr Emerson quotes thinkers who influenced Forster, including Samuel Butler. It was adapted as a film of the same name in 1985 by the Merchant Ivory team, starring Helena Bonham Carter and Daniel Day-Lewis, and as a televised adaptation of the same name in 2007 by Andrew Davies.[41]
Where Angels Fear to Tread and A Room with a View can be seen as Forster's Italian novels. Both include references to the famous Baedeker guidebooks and concern narrow-minded middle-class English tourists abroad. The books share themes with his short stories collected in The Celestial Omnibus and The Eternal Moment.
Howards End (1910) is an ambitious "condition-of-England" novel about various groups among the Edwardian middle classes, represented by the Schlegels (bohemian intellectuals), the Wilcoxes (thoughtless plutocrats) and the Basts (struggling lower-middle-class aspirants). Howards End was adapted as a film in 1992 by the Merchant-Ivory team, starring Vanessa Redgrave, Emma Thompson, Anthony Hopkins, and Helena Bonham-Carter. Thompson won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance as Margaret Schlegel.[42] It was also adapted as a miniseries in 2017. An opera libretto Howards End, America was created in 2016 by Claudia Stevens.[43]
Forster's greatest success, A Passage to India (1924), takes as its subject the relations between East and West, seen through the lens of India in the later days of the British Raj. Forster connects personal relations with the politics of colonialism through the story of the Englishwoman Adela Quested, the Indian Dr. Aziz, and the question of what did or did not happen between them in the Marabar Caves. Forster makes special mention of the author Ahmed Ali and his Twilight in Delhi in a preface to its Everyman's Library Edition. A Passage to India was adapted as a play in 1960, directed by Frank Hauser, and as a film in 1984, directed by David Lean, starring Alec Guinness, Judy Davis and Peggy Ashcroft, with the latter winning the 1985 Oscar for Best Supporting Actress.[44]
Maurice (1971), published posthumously, is a homosexual love story that also returns to matters familiar from Forster's first three novels, such as the suburbs of London in the English home counties, the experience of attending Cambridge, and the wild landscape of Wiltshire. The novel was controversial, given that Forster's homosexuality had not been publicly known or widely acknowledged. Today's critics continue to debate over the extent to which Forster's sexuality and personal activities influenced his writing.[45] Maurice was adapted as a film in 1987 by the Merchant Ivory team. It starred James Wilby and Hugh Grant who played lovers (for which both gained acclaim) and Rupert Graves, with Denholm Elliott, Simon Callow and Ben Kingsley in the supporting cast.[46]
Early in his career, Forster attempted a historical novel about the Byzantine scholar Gemistus Pletho and the Italian condottiero Sigismondo de Malatesta, but was dissatisfied with the result and never published it, though he kept the manuscript and later showed it to Naomi Mitchison.[47]
Forster's first novel, Where Angels Fear to Tread, was described by reviewers as "astonishing" and "brilliantly original".[48] The Manchester Guardian (forerunner of The Guardian) noted "a persistent vein of cynicism which is apt to repel," though "the cynicism is not deep-seated." The novel is labelled "a sordid comedy culminating, unexpectedly and with a real dramatic force, in a grotesque tragedy."[49] Lionel Trilling remarked on this first novel as "a whole and mature work dominated by a fresh and commanding intelligence".[50]
Subsequent books were similarly received on publication. The Manchester Guardian commented on Howards End, describing it as "a novel of high quality written with what appears to be a feminine brilliance of perception... witty and penetrating."[51] An essay by David Cecil in Poets and Storytellers (1949) describes Forster as "pulsing with intelligence and sensibility", but primarily concerned with an original moral vision: "He tells a story as well as anyone who ever lived".[52][page needed]
American interest in Forster was spurred by Lionel Trilling's E. M. Forster: A Study, which called him "the only living novelist who can be read again and again and who, after each reading, gives me what few writers can give us after our first days of novel-reading, the sensation of having learned something." (Trilling 1943)
Criticism of his works has included comment on unlikely pairings of characters who marry or get engaged, and the lack of realistic depiction of sexual attraction.[52][page needed]
Forster was President of the Cambridge Humanists from 1959 until his death and a member of the Advisory Council of the British Humanist Association from 1963 until his death. His views as a humanist are at the heart of his work, which often depicts the pursuit of personal connections despite the restrictions of contemporary society. His humanist attitude is expressed in the 1938 essay What I Believe (reprinted with two other humanist essays – and an introduction and notes by Nicolas Walter). When Forster's cousin, Philip Whichelo, donated a portrait of Forster to the Gay and Lesbian Humanist Association (GLHA), Jim Herrick, the founder, quoted Forster's words: "The humanist has four leading characteristics – curiosity, a free mind, belief in good taste, and belief in the human race."[53]
Two of Forster's best-known works, A Passage to India and Howards End, explore the irreconcilability of class differences. A Room with a View also shows how questions of propriety and class can make human connection difficult. The novel is his most widely read and accessible work, remaining popular long after its original publication. His posthumous novel Maurice explores the possibility of class reconciliation as one facet of a homosexual relationship.
Sexuality is another key theme in Forster's works. Some critics have argued that a general shift from heterosexual to homosexual love can be observed through the course of his writing career. The foreword to Maurice describes his struggle with his homosexuality, while he explored similar issues in several volumes of short stories. Forster's explicitly homosexual writings, the novel Maurice and the short story collection The Life to Come, were published shortly after his death. Beyond his literary explorations of sexuality, Forster also expressed his views publicly; in 1953, Forster openly advocated in The New Statesman and Nation for a change in law in regard to homosexuality (which would be legalised in England and Wales in 1967, three years prior to his death), arguing that homosexuality between adults should be treated without bias and on the same grounds as heterosexuality.[55]
Forster is noted for his use of symbolism as a technique in his novels, and he has been criticised (as by his friend Roger Fry) for his attachment to mysticism. One example of his symbolism is the wych elm tree in Howards End.[56] The characters of Mrs Wilcox in that novel and Mrs Moore in A Passage to India have a mystical link with the past, and a striking ability to connect with people from beyond their own circles. Forster, Henry James, and W. Somerset Maugham were the earliest writers in English to portray characters from diverse countries – France, Germany, Italy and India. Their work explores cultural conflict, but arguably the motifs of humanism and cosmopolitanism are dominant. In a way this is anticipation of the concept of human beings shedding national identities and becoming more and more liberal and tolerant.
A wide variety of other journals, plays, and draft fiction are archived at King's College.[59]