SOURCE: "The Lonely Voice," in E. M. Forster: A Literary Life, St. Martin's Press, 1995, pp. 131-39.

In this excerpt, Lago considers the posthumously published short fiction a valuable and rewarding epilogue to Forster's publishing history .

Although Forster defined himself as novelist, the short story is the literary form with which his writing career really began and to which he returned with great seriousness after he had given up work on any new novels. In 1902, when he wrote his first story, 'The Story of a Panic', he was one of the number of experimenters who were making the English short story modern. The Irish writer Frank O'Connor has called it The Lonely Voice': lonely because 'almost from its beginnings it abandoned the device of a public art in which the storyteller assumed the mass consent of an audience to his wildest improvisations.' The modern short story, O'Connor says...