He instead turned towards literary theory and criticism, academic pursuits filling the rest of his long life. Forster was very much a product of the early Modernist era, and after the war, plaintively stated that he no longer knew how to write novels for this post-War world. Forster was never quite comfortable with this privileged life handed to him, though, and most of his work reflected on the disparity between the classes in Edwardian England.įour of his six novels were published before the First World War. When his great-aunt died in 1887, she left Forster an £8000 legacy (worth about half a million pounds today) which allowed him to further his education at Tonbridge school in Kent, then King’s College, Cambridge. Born in 1879, Forster’s father died of tuberculosis the following year, and he was raised under the heavy influence of his mother and other female relations, who shaped his perception, and later characterisation, of women.

It is for these novels, more than his short stories, that Forster is remembered, bolstered in recent years by the Merchant-Ivory film productions of his canon. A sixth, Maurice, about a homosexual relationship, though written in 1913, was not published until 1971, a year after his death, because Forster did not want to publicise his sexual orientation.

Fear the Machine: EM Forster’s “The Machine Stops”Įdward Morgan Forster wrote only five published novels in his lifetime, all of them by the age of 45.

The machine stops novel