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'superbly illuminating biography' -- The Telgraph, June 5th 2010
'Moffat isn't gossipy or reductive - the Forster who emerges from her work is a more human and satisfying figure then we've known' -- Time magazine, June 14th 2010
'Wendy Moffat...a fluent writer, and at the many points where it would have been easier to simplify or judge, she displays a Forsterish combination of equanimity and magnanimity.' -- New Statesman, June 7th 2010
This is an exemplary biography, its elegance and humour successfully concealing its erudition. It is the story of a pilgrimage towards humanity.' --The Times, June 15th 2010
'a rich, well-honed biography, filled with vivid character sketches, and convincing concerning Forster's inner struggle.' --Book of the Week, Independent, June 18th 2010
'Moffat isn't gossipy or reductive - the Forster who emerges from her work is a more human and satisfying figure then we've known' -- Time magazine, June 14th 2010
'Wendy Moffat...a fluent writer, and at the many points where it would have been easier to simplify or judge, she displays a Forsterish combination of equanimity and magnanimity.' -- New Statesman, June 7th 2010
This is an exemplary biography, its elegance and humour successfully concealing its erudition. It is the story of a pilgrimage towards humanity.' --The Times, June 15th 2010
'a rich, well-honed biography, filled with vivid character sketches, and convincing concerning Forster's inner struggle.' --Book of the Week, Independent, June 18th 2010
Product Description
One of the great mysteries in the life of E. M. Forster (1879-1970) is why, after the publication of "A Passage to India" in 1924, he never published another novel although he lived to be 90. In Wendy Moffat's biography, based on a lifetime's dedication to her subject, we gain extraordinary insights into a man with a gift for writing fiction of great humanity, warmth and humour, who realised early that the society of his time would not allow him to publish the fiction he really wanted to write. At the end of "A Passage to India", his readers were left with the melancholy sight of Aziz and Fielding, friends of different races and cultures, riding out of the novel down separate paths. In real life, although frustrated at not being able to write out of his true self - it would not be until after his death that Maurice, his novel of a homosexual affair, would be published - E. M. Forster led a full and energetic life. He was a successful broadcaster, a brilliant essayist ("Abinger Harvest" and "Two Cheers for Democracy" are still must-reads) and a leading figure in Europe's intellectual life. Moffat argues that with his support for colleagues from Lowes Dickinson and Radclyffe Hall to Christopher Isherwood and Benjamin Britten, and his quiet championing of humanistic values, he helped create the more tolerant world we now enjoy. Moffat's achievement is not to show that Forster was homosexual (this is well known) but how deeply his ideas on individual freedom, tolerance, sexuality and love, permeated every act and aspect of his life.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Brings Forster brilliantly to life.,
By
This review is from: E. M. Forster: A New Life (Hardcover)
Christopher Isherwood said, after Forster's death, that anything written about him should start with the fact that he was homosexual because that was the key to everything. So this book is well timed since it is possible to see the literary and life constraints under which Forster laboured from the perspective of a more liberated time. Wendy Moffat brings Forster to life as a human being, as well as a writer. His suppressed, rather than repressed, homosexuality massively influenced what he could write, and even more what he could publish, and he struggled for happiness and sexual fulfilment as a gay man before finding it well into his 30s.Moffat brings Forster to life. He comes across as a much more interesting and engaging person than I, at least, had thought and, even today, it is possible to feel for him struggling to find an outlet for his humanity which could, of course, only fully express itself in relationships with other men. His story is also the story of a century: two world wars, the Raj and a society bound by conventions ans hypocrisy. All of this tale is told vividly and with authority. This is a first class and eminently readable book.
17 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A superb biography,
By Reader/listener (England) - See all my reviews
This review is from: E. M. Forster: A New Life (Hardcover)
The week has been happily spent reading Wendy Moffat's superb new biography of E.M. Forster, A Great Unrecorded History. It's a cliché to say that a book is revelatory, and it's a cliché that doesn't need to be used here, because although there are some new things in it (principally how many lovers Forster had from the mid-1920s: more than you'd probably thought), most of the detail is already known. There is, though, I think something fresh and inspiring about it.Part of the freshness no doubt comes from how well written it is. Moffat writes very engagingly, with care, a good sense of pace, a feel for story-telling and, above all, a sense of human discrimination. (It's tempting to say that she's done her subject proud, although I suspect that her subject, who embodied all these values in his own writing, attracted her in the first place - Moffat's admiration for Forster, while never uncritical or cloying, is clear.) And so although Moffat explores Forster from the potentially crass perspective of his sexuality, the result is believable and convincing. Indeed, instead of the situation described by Forster in A Passage to India - `There is always trouble when two people do not think of sex at the same moment, always mutual resentment and surprise' - Moffat is persuasive enough to make us believe that this is the sort of biography Forster would have wanted. In 1932 Forster wrote: `I wish I could get [a biography] written about me after I die, but I should want every thing told, everything.' P.N. Furbank's excellent 1977-78 biography was that biography, and it was upfront enough about Forster's homosexuality. Yet since then biographers have been increasingly insistent on exploring the significance of Forster's sexuality, and Moffat's is the most tell-all biography yet. Forster's caveat that a tell-all biography should be published after his death is significant, and surely a key to understanding him. The flipside to the courage Forster displayed in his personal life, amounting at times almost to a sort of gay militancy (Moffat reminds us that Forster died the year after the Stonewall riots), is that he was super-sensitive to the opinion of others, even when he did not respect the moral or intellectual reasoning of those opinions. When a friend encouraged Forster to come out publicly, pointing to the example of André Gide, who had done so, Forster retorted: `But Gide hasn't got a mother!' Forster did have a mother, Lily, and even after she died in 1945 he remained cautious, resisting publication of Maurice for fear that it would lead to too much trouble. There's a passage in The Longest Journey which I think sums up this aspect of Forster well. `Rickie [Forster's most autobiographical hero] suffered from the Primal Curse, which is not - as the Authorised Version suggests - the knowledge of good and evil, but the knowledge of good-and-evil'; in other words, life, and other people, not in black and white terms, but in connections between people, in not taking sides, in not being left exposed or vulnerable. Moffat handles both sides of Forster sensitively and well. Her biography feels natural because she is aware of the complexity of Forster's attitude towards his sexuality, and towards the people who surrounded him in life. She allows the contradictions, evasions and inconsistencies to exist without trying to smooth them away or harness them to some agenda. A superb book.
9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Only One Aspect of E. M. Forster,
By
This review is from: E. M. Forster: A New Life (Hardcover)
Wendy Moffat offers in the new biography of E. M. Forster a unique but not necessarily valuable approach to his life and work. Her major strength was the access to his previously unpublished secret memoirs (not for long, an edition is finally announced for February 2011 although at 275GBP few will choose to buy it) and the fact influenced the book much more that it was worth."The New Life" turned out to be most sexual life. When you consider that Forster did not have any sex involving partners of any kind until he turned thirty-eight it is no mean feat and yet quite apparently not enough to make this book a valuable addition to the three biographies of the writer we already had: Furbank, King, and Beauman. Except for an addition to what had already been said (and usually better) of some rather uninspiring details of Forster's sex life, there is little that is new here. Actually, one can hardly speak of details as Forster described them in a personal code, always afraid that his diaries might be discovered and he would end up in jail. Intended to commemorate the novelist's 130th anniversary the book falls flat and any readers interested in the life of E. M. Forster (and those who like to read bulky volumes) are strongly recommended to look up either the work of Furbank (if they want Forster's version of his life) or that of Beauman (if they want some more or less educated guesses about what Forster preferred to cover up). If you prefer something less bulky (and nicely illustrated) Francis King remains the natural choice.
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