E. M. Forster

Edward Morgan Forster was born in London in 1879. Raised by his widowed mother, he studied at King’s College, Cambridge, where friendships and intellectual freedom helped shape his writing.

“A Room with a View” (1908), “Howards End” (1910) and “A Passage to India” (1924) examined class, prejudice and the difficulty of making connections across social boundaries. Their criticism of convention often depends on the distance between respectable appearances and what people actually feel.

After visiting Edward Carpenter, Forster began “Maurice” in 1913, completing an initial version the following year. Its love story between men ends with the possibility of happiness rather than punishment. He shared the manuscript privately but withheld publication during his lifetime; it appeared in 1971.

Forster’s relationship with the married policeman Bob Buckingham became central to his later life, and he remained close to Buckingham’s family. He declined a knighthood but accepted the Order of Merit. Forster died at the Buckinghams’ home in Coventry on 7 June 1970, aged 91. The posthumous publication of “Maurice” made an important part of his imaginative and personal world publicly visible.