Forster made his chief contribution to the subject [of the novel] in the Clark Lectures which he delivered in the spring of 1927. [They were printed unrevised as Aspects of the Novel.] (p. 73) [What we find in this collection] is an idea of the novel which will stand beside the great celebrations of the epic form. It might have helped if Forster had edited away quotations and discussions of contemporary books now forgotten, if some listener had made notes of the fine things and left the rest, as happened to...

In this excerpt, Herz discusses the doubleness of Forster's short fiction as revealed in the disjunctive relationship between narrative strategies and narrative voice .

In the following excerpt, Colmer discusses the role of place, the supernatural, pagan mythology, and the importance of the past as dominant themes in Forster's short fiction.

In the excerpt below, Trilling discusses how Forster's short stories illumine our understanding of his novels.

Here, Thomson, a noted Forster scholar, discusses the mythical and archetypal aspects of Forster's short stories.

In this excerpt, Godfrey discusses Forster's preoccupation with the effects of the unseen supernatural as it relates to the plots and characterizations of his short stories.

In this laudatory essay, Hagopian focuses on Forster's ironic yet sympathetic portrayal of his principal characters in "The Road from Colonus" and "The Eternal Moment."

In the following excerpt, Kessel argues that Forster used fantasy elements to clarify his belief that human salvation depends on the ability of people to connect.

In this excerpt, Wilde argues that Forster's acceptance of chaos, evidenced in the posthumous short stories, reflects a diminishing of Forster's vision.

[The Longest Journey, Where Angels Fear to Tread, and A Room with a View are all] concerned with the dual theme of personal salvation and the conflict of good and evil. Of the three it is The Longest Journey which is the most emotionally intense and personal, the others being more objectively conceived novels of social comedy…. In each of these novels we have two opposed worlds or ways of life, and characters who oscillate between the two worlds. (p. 48)

In the following excerpt, Miller argues that the constrained quality of Forster's posthumous publications justifies the author's own misgivings about their literary merit.

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

Here, Page analyzes how the posthumous stories develop more fully the central themes and techniques first explored in the early short stories.

In facing any problem, [Forster] tended to define it dualistically. But he could not leave it there. "Only connect" is his prayer and his argument: only connect the prose and the passion, the seen and the unseen, the private and the public, the near and the far, the conscious and the unconscious, the body and the soul. (p. 386) [What] the posthumously published homosexual fiction (Maurice and the stories in The Life to Come) brings home with special force is just how much the ideal of "...

E. M. Forster arrived in Alexandria in 1915. He was thirty-six and already an established writer, with four novels and a collection of short stories behind him and a fifth novel written but unseen. Forster's was a unique voice, even from the start, large and marked by a generous humanism that has not found its equal in contemporary British fiction. He had already toured Greece, Italy, and India, and his early fiction reflects this contact with worlds that call into question the values of upper-middle...

In the following excerpt, Welty, an acclaimed novelist and essayist, notes that while the stories of The Life to Come are linked to Forster's other fiction by their emphasis on passion, they are flawed by the absence of Forster's comic genius.

In the following excerpt, Cavaliero praises the posthumously published short stories for their irreverent humor and satirical power.

Mr. Forster is extremely susceptible to the influence of time. He sees his people much at the mercy of those conditions which change with the years. He is acutely conscious of the bicycle and of the motor-car; of the public school and of the university; of the suburb and of the city. The social historian will find his books full of illuminating information…. Mr. Forster is a novelist, that is to say, who sees his people in close contact with their surroundings…. But we discover as we turn the ...

Mr. Forster is a kind of Symbolist. He declares for the autonomy of the work of art; for co-essence of form and meaning; for art as "organic and free from dead matter"; for music as a criterion of formal purity; for the work's essential anonymity. Like all art, he thinks, the novel must fuse differentiation into unity, in order to provide meaning we can experience; art is "the one orderly product that our muddling race has produced," the only unity and therefore the only m...

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

Since its publication in 1909, E. M. Forster's longest novella, "The Machine Stops," has received brief and sometimes begrudging critical attention, though a few critics have rightly recognized it as a masterpiece of science fiction…. For the imaginative predictions Forster made sixty-five years ago have proven to be frighteningly prophetic, and the story is one of the first of a distinguished family of serious twentieth-century anti-utopian novels. Written long before Aldous Hux...

Where another writer possessed of an unusual outlook on life would be careful to introduce it, gradually preparing the way by views from more ordinary standpoints, Mr. Forster does nothing of the kind. This very sentence tacitly assumes that the personal point of view is already occupied by the reader, who is left to orient himself as he can. This may lead to lamentable misunderstandings. For example, once we have picked up the author's position we see that the characters in his early books, Mrs. Her...

Ten of the 14 short stories in E. M. Forster's posthumously published collection, The Life to Come, deal in one way or another with love between males. They vary widely in tone and setting, from the Ruritanian farce of "What Does It Matter?" to the grim realism of "The Other Boat," from the English domesticity of "Arthur Snatchfold" to the exotic locale of "The Life to Come." What binds all these stories together is the basic myth or fable which...

In this favorable estimation of The Collected Tales, Baker praises Forster for his power of imagination and insight

In this excerpt, Meyers asserts that the homosexual stories of The Life to Come are feeble, timid, and selfindulgent.

More than most successful writers E. M. Forster proceeded by fits and starts; success with him never produced a formula he could go on using. Two novels at least were aborted. The first, known as Nottingham Lace from its opening words, was Forster's first attempt, and petered out after 50 pages. The second, which he proposed to call Arctic Summer, exists in two major fragments, representing different attempts to come to grips with the plot. It was begun in 1911, a year after Howards End had made for ...

SOURCE; "Maurice and Fictions of Homosexuality," in Forster's Narrative Vision, Cornell University Press, 1982, pp. 150-83. In this excerpt, Rosecrance notes that the homosexual stories reveal defeat and the fragmentation of Forster's artistry.

The trouble with Rickie Elliot's short stories, and equally with Forster's own, is an overbalance of meaningfulness at the expense of represented life—a preponderance of "unearned" symbolism. That this imperfection is less conspicuous in Forster's novels is largely due, I think, to the operation of a contrary feeling, his sense of the comic. Comedy provides the counterweight to keep the symbolist from slipping too far toward allegory; it continually refreshes his aw...

Below, Hynes notes that Forster's recently published sexual fantasies lack artistic merit but command interest for their honesty.

Both in theory and in practice Forster declines to restrict the novelist's ancient liberties. The richness of the novel, for him, lies in its range of levels. There is the "story"; then there are the persons of the story who act and speak; then there is the "inner life" of the characters, to be overheard and translated by the author; and, finally, there is the philosophic commentary of the author. Plot, characters, philosophy: each has a life of its own and threatens to ex...

In the following excerpt, Miles comments that civility is the essential quality of Forster's writing.

In this review, Mansfield, a highly respected writer and literary critic, cautiously praises Forster's "Story of the Siren" for its sensibility and humor, but notes that he does not entirely commit his imagination to his writing.

In the following excerpt, Hardwick argues that Forster's stories are overly restrained and ultimately minor, despite his expert craftsmanship.

In the following excerpt, Summers notes the importance of Forster's short fiction to our understanding of his artistic vision.

In this favorable review, Kronenberger notes Forster's successful venture into the realm of fantasy literature.

In this mixed assessment, Muir praises the genius of several stories, but describes the remainder of the collection as flawed by sociological concerns.

In this unfavorable review of The Life to Come, Scruton describes the collection as unpleasant and indecent in its callow portrayal of homosexual relationships.

In this examination of Forster's short fiction, Redman focuses on the central theme of escape from the stifling conventionalities of ñre-World War I England.

Forster's novella The Machine Stops established the essential outlines of the dystopian parable. It is set, of course, in the future, at a time when men have abandoned the surface of the earth to live in massive underground cities resembling air-conditioned anthills. Here, in a completely controlled and artificial environment, they are removed from all contact with Nature…. (p. 90) In this story … Forster has anticipated most, if not quite all, of the themes of subsequent dystopian nove...

[Arctic Summer is] not of very great interest except to Forster enthusiasts. Becoming a Forster enthusiast is luckily not difficult, and anyone reading or rereading P. N. Furbank's [E. M. Forster: A Life], in particular, would find it worthwhile to look at these fragments for the light they throw on Forster's themes and preoccupations. Being unfinished, they can show at what points he became blocked in his writing and why…. ["Nottingham Lace" and "Ralph and Tony�...

[Arctic Summer and Other Fiction contains] the remnants of Forster's unpublished or uncompleted novels and short stories…. All these pieces and fragments date from the earliest years of the author's activity, roughly from 1899 to 1914 and show him experimenting with themes and methods of presentation. (p. 94) Prominent themes throughout the collection are those for which Forster later became well known as an adept in their handling—class differences; the friendship and affection ...