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Freitag, 17. August 2018

On the Slyly Subversive Writing of E.M. Forster / Wendy Moffat In: Lit Hub Daily. August 16, 2018

E.M. Forster conceived of A Room with a View in 1901, when he was 22. Months after graduation from Cambridge, marooned with his mother in a dreary Neapolitan pensione that catered to middle-class British tourists, without a job or even the prospect of a career, the young Forster felt alienated and adrift. He sketched out a list of characters—“Lucy . . . her cousin Miss Bartlett . . . Miss Lavish”—followed by the urgent question “Doing what?” It would take seven years of stops and starts to answer that question. But in wrestling A Room with a View into print, Forster came to understand both his characters and himself. His lifelong subject would be the tragicomic limitations of the English character and the moral consequences of an “undeveloped heart.” Writing this novel showed him who he was and where he belonged in the world, and as he found himself, he found his voice as one of the great writers of the 20th century.

In his final months at Cambridge, Forster was elected to the secret intellectual society known as the Apostles. Ethics was their subject, friendship their secular theology. This small fraternity dedicated to liberal ideas produced some of the most influential British men of the 20th century: the economist John Maynard Keynes, who devised policies that would lift the Great Depression of the 1930s; the editor and political writer Leonard Woolf; the art critic Roger Fry, who brought the French post-impressionist painters Cézanne and Matisse to British audiences; the biographer Lytton Strachey; and the philosopher Bertrand Russell. The Apostles were serious about their philosophy, and sometimes eccentric in their mien. They knocked down Victorian shibboleths to make way for modern new ideas—women’s rights and social equality, personal liberty and public art. As they migrated after university to the then-shabby Bloomsbury neighborhood near the British Museum, the bohemian circle extended to women who were barred from Cambridge because of their sex—Virginia Woolf (who would marry Leonard) and her sister, the artist Vanessa Bell. Thus Forster was knit into the Bloomsbury Group at its inception.

But for Forster, that intellectual and artistic community was still far in the future. Just at the moment when his friends began to hone their plans for occupations in the civil service, colonial administration, or teaching, Forster lost momentum. It was considerably easier for him to see what he was not than to imagine what he might become. His undistinguished marks on exams foreclosed the prospect of an academic career; he shifted his course of study from classics to history and stayed on for a fourth year to complete his degree. In 1901, the year Queen Victoria died, Forster graduated from Cambridge. He embarked on a yearlong tour of Italy in the sole company of his mother. ... [mehr] https://lithub.com/on-the-slyly-subversive-writing-of-e-m-forster/

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