E. M. Forster's reputation as a writer may justly be said to rest, essentially, on his novels. His output as a novelist was not large: only six novels were completed, of which the fifth, Maurice (finished in 1914), became available to readers only after his death in 1970. Nevertheless Forster belongs, with D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf, in the front rank of twentieth-century English novelists, and his last novel, the undisputed masterpiece A Passage to India, not only continues to attract the educated general reader but figures in the curricula of university departments of English all over the world.

The writing of novels, however, occupied Forster only from about 1900 (the composition date of his first, unfinished attempt at one, published in 1980 under the title Nottingham Lace) to 1924, when A Passage to India appeared. He had also written short stories from the very beginning of his career, and a few...