SOURCE: "Publishable and Worth It: Forster's Hitherto Unpublished Fiction," in Twilight of Dawn: Studies in English Literature in Transition, University of Arizona Press, 1987, pp. 189-205.

In this excerpt, an eminent Forster scholar favorably assesses Forster's posthumous fiction for its intensity and complexity.

Arctic Summer and Other Fiction, a volume in the monumental Abinger Edition of E. M. Forster, is unusually interesting for students of modern literature and for Forster scholars. In this volume the editors (Oliver Stallybrass and, after his death, Elizabeth Heine) have reprinted works that Forster either abandoned or never submitted for publication; even those that seem to be complete units were probably not finished to his full satisfaction. Except for eight short fragments at the end of the volume, the reprinted items are more than fragments and possess, some of them, considerable literary value, in addition to being sources of record for what they tell...