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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