The Essential E.M. Forster (Annotated)

A Room with a View · Howards End · A Passage to India — Three Complete Novels with Critical Essays | Classic British Literary Fiction | Erato Press

By: E. M. Forster

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

"Only connect." Two words that became the most famous imperative in English fiction — and the one its author spent three novels proving was impossible.

E.M. Forster published five novels in nineteen years. Then he stopped. He was forty-five years old, at the height of his powers, and he never published another novel again. He lived for forty-six more years in silence. The five novels he left behind — especially the three collected here — are among the most penetrating studies of human connection and disconnection in the English language: what it means to reach across the divisions of class, culture, nation, and temperament, and what happens when the structures of the world make that reaching fail.

This Erato Press critical edition brings together Forster's three essential novels in a single annotated volume, with three original critical essays by Henry Bugalho totalling over forty-five thousand words.

A Room with a View (1908) — Lucy Honeychurch travels to Florence, sees the Arno, sees a murder, is kissed in a field of violets, and returns to England to discover that the medieval arrangements of her life — the chaperones, the proprieties, the view that someone else has chosen for her — are no longer sufficient. A comedy of manners that is also a revolution: the story of a young woman who learns to choose her own view.

Howards End (1910) — The Schlegels believe in culture, conversation, and the inner life. The Wilcoxes believe in business, empire, and the outer life. Between them stands a house in the English countryside and the question that haunts every page: can these two Englands connect? Forster's answer is devastating, generous, and as unresolved today as it was in 1910.

A Passage to India (1924) — Dr. Aziz, an Indian Muslim physician, befriends two English women in the fictional city of Chandrapore. He takes them to the Marabar Caves. Something happens in the Caves — something the novel refuses, absolutely and finally, to explain. From this refusal, the entire machinery of the British Raj springs into motion, and the question of whether genuine friendship is possible between coloniser and colonised is answered with a silence that is more eloquent than any verdict.

✦ Three complete, unabridged novels — over 800 pages of essential British fiction.

This edition also includes: ✦ "Only Connect: Forster and the Grammar of Human Failure" — an essay on the structural impossibility of connection in Forster's fiction: class in England, empire in India, the echo in the Caves ✦ "England, Their England: Forster and the Edwardian Crisis" — the historical context: the decline of Liberal England, the weight of empire, the world that produced these novels and was destroyed by them ✦ "E.M. Forster: The Man Who Stopped" — a biographical essay on the writer who fell silent at the height of his powers and the secret life he lived in that silence

For readers who enjoy: ✦ Classic British fiction and Edwardian literature ✦ Novels about women, class, and social constraint ✦ Colonial and postcolonial fiction set in India ✦ Critical editions with substantial scholarly essays

"Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height." — E.M. Forster, Howards End