Gardner, Philip. E. M. Forster. Harlox, Essex, England: Longmans Group, 1978.
Herz, Judith Scherer, and Martin, Robert K. E. M. Forster: Centenary Reevaluations. London: Macmillan, 1982.
Medalie, David. E. M. Forster’s Modernism. New York: Pal-grave Macmillan, 2002.
Pritchard, William H. Seeing Through Everything: English Writers, 1918-1940. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.
Trilling, Lionel. E. M. Forster. Norfolk, CT: New Directions, 1943.
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1 ‘The official biography is P. N. Furbank’s E. M. Forster: A Life (1977, 1978). This quote is from page 42. Other excellent works on Forster include Lionel Trilling’s early study E. M. Forster (1943), the tribute volume Aspects of E. M. Forster (1969), edited by Oliver Stallybrass, and Nicola Beauman’s Morgan (1993).
2 The highly select Cambridge Conversazione Society (founded 1820), aka The Society or The Apostles. Members were elected for life. Forster often returned to Cambridge for their meetings.
3 Roughly defined as the circle around Virginia Woolf, Bloomsbury was a loosely structured group of friends with diverse political and aesthetic views who came to hold great influence in the English art and literary worlds, especially in the 1920s. Forster wasn’t sure he was (or wanted to be) “Bloomsbury,” although he was very popular in the group.
4 E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel (London: Harcourt, Brace, 1927), p. 69.
5 “I have only got down on to paper, really, three types of people,” Forster remarked, “the person I think I am, the people who irritate me, and the people I’d like to be.”
6 E. M. Forster, Howards End (New York: Signet Classics, 1998): p. 85.
7 ‘E. M. Forster, The Commonplace Book (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 1978), pp. 203-4.