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Publishing History, Critical Reception, Honors, and PopularityEarly in his development, when he defined and sought perfect intellectual freedom at Cambridge and then achieved it among the members of the Bloomsbury Group and the Independent Review, Forster fashioned firmly held aesthetic values, personal integrity, and honest human relationships. Those qualities became the thematic essences of his novels and short stories. With those Cambridge-Bloomsbury standards, he struck down the facades of pre-World War I English middle-class character values and their equally superficial guardians--the civil service, the Established Church, the public (private) schools. Essentially, Forster's reputation as a writer of fiction arises from four novels published prior to World War I, another that came forth seven years after that conflict, a posthumously published piece begun as early as 1913, and several volumes of short stories--in sum, not a terribly productive output in terms of the writer's long earthly tenure. Thus, all of the previously mentioned values can easily find their separate or collective ways in the pre-World War I novels--particularly in The Longest Journey (1907)--while the period of his travels through Italy extend into Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905) and A Room with a View (1908). In Howards End (1910), Forster reveals himself as his nation's principal representative of humanism, while the posthumously published and somewhat outdated Maurice reveals the strains and the tensions brought about with having to deal with one's homosexuality in a nation that considered, from the late 1880s until the early 1960s, such practice illegal and rewarded its practitioners with prison sentences. Forster reached his zenith with A Passage to India, portraying the unique sense of the tragedy of the chasm between Indians and English, even if neither desires its existence. In addition, Forster succeeded in forging his novel on three levels: the realistic, the psychological, and the symbolic--the last underscoring the spiritual tensions of two clashing civilizations. At the same time, however, he scrutinizes with extreme care the contrasts between Indian susceptibilities and English values, and totally destroys the type of camaraderie and common goals of empire portrayed in the fiction and poetry of Rudyard Kipling.
From the most distant critical voices to those of the present, Forster's reputation as a writer of fiction appears to rest upon A Passage to India. That novel having been transformed into a fairly successful film in 1984, it continues, some three quarters of a century after its literary "birth," to find readers. For the novelist and essayist Emily Rose Macaulay (1881-1958), writing in June 1924, Forster stood as a visual artist writing prose fiction, as "the most attractive and the most exquisite of contemporary novelists . . . Further, he is probably the most truthful, both superficially and fundamentally. His delicate character presentation--too organic to be called drawing--his gentle and pervading humour, his sense and conveyal of the beauty, the ridiculousness, and the nightmare strangeness, of all life, his accurate recording of social, intellectual and spiritual shades and reactions, his fine-spun honesty of thought, his poetry and ironic wit--these qualities made him from the first one of the rather few novelists who can be read with delight." In that same year, Ralph Wright of the New Statesman, having waited patiently since 1910 (Howards End) for another Forster novel, identified A Passage to India as "a better book than any earlier ones. It is as sensitive as they were, it is far better proportioned, and the mind which made it more mature." Unfortunately, Forster's final example of fictional "delight" came forty-six years before his death, and thus for almost half a century, his mind and pen deposited no ink on blank pages reserved for his long fiction, and thus his status in the 1980s and 1990s has suffered at the hands of the literary historians. Little wonder, then, that Wilfred Stone could observe, some four years prior to the writer's passing, that "The modern world has forced him [Forster] out of business as an artist, but not as a spokesman for Art. He does not raise his voice and his stance is unprophetic--that of one who looks away as he speaks, who [according to Forster's own words] `makes a perpetual slight displacement of the expected emphasis,' who calls himself `old-fashioned.'" With equal misfortune, the significant external influences on Forster, Cambridge University at the turn of the nineteenth century and such places as Egypt, Greece, Italy, and India to which he journeyed prior to World War II, have become buried too deeply in the past. Unable to rise above that history, he could no longer write the type of fiction that had formed the substance and style of earlier his art. Certainly current scholars continue view him as the humanist of those periods, but other humanists who wrote drama, poetry, and fiction during the decades following World War II embraced more immediate and more recognizable causes. Even the controversial Maurice, with its topic of homosexual love, which could easily have fit into the milieu and tempo of the 1970s, did little to elevate Forster's reputation. It proved too deeply rooted to its 1913-1914 historical and social setting, and as well as being too biographical. "Too much is told to us instead of being dramatized," wrote Frederick P. W. McDowell in the Virginia Woolf Quarterly, "especially in the early chapters; and rather too much time in Maurice's life passes perfunctorily in too few pages."
Exactly how much money Forster earned from his books and lectures proves difficult to determine without extensive investigation. The interest from his great aunt's 8,000-pound trust maintained him until he reached age twenty-five (1904), when he received the principal. In addition, he received a significant sum upon the death of his aunt, Laura Mary Forster, that event coming in 1924, just prior to the publication of A Passage to India. Indeed, that wealthy woman emerged early as the writer's principal benefactor. Thus, a lack of money never prevented Forster from his travels nor forced him to seek "employment." Nonetheless, the very presence of money bothered him. He lived unpretentiously and frugally--particularly at Cambridge for the last twenty-four years of his life; a steady income from royalties and fees more than adequately sustained him, but did not make him wealthy--even though A Passage to India sold over thirty thousand copies in the United States within the first month of its publication. During the first decades of the twentieth century, such publishing houses as William Blackwood and Sons, Edward Arnold and Company, Sedgwick and Jackson, and Alfred A. Knopf drove hard bargains with their writers, paying them as little as possible. However, in 1962, Forster gave several thousand pounds to the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge for the purchase of Greek sculpture; he donated the manuscript of A Passage to India to the London Library, and that item fetched 6,500 pounds at an auction at Christie's. In April 1964, Forster told Maurice Hill (1909-1966), the Cambridge geophysicist, that his personal account housed 20,000 pounds, and a week later he abruptly turned over half of that sum to Bob Buckingham and his wife May. Indeed, a tally of the amounts dolled out to such friends as the Buckinghams and Joe Acklerley would yield a fair estimate of Forster's income and net worth. For example, in a letter accompanying a one-thousand-pound check to Ackerley, Forster identified his act of beneficence as "both easy and pleasant."
Forster, himself, in a 1958 interview in The Paris Review, remarked, that "I have always found writing pleasant . . . I've enjoyed it, but believe that in some ways it is good. Whether it will last, I have no idea." Perhaps the final testament to that remark, as well as to the state of Forster's present literary popularity generally, may be observed within the sixth edition (1993) of the standard Norton Anthology of English Literature, Volume Two. Among Forster's close contemporaries, Virginia Woolf appears with six selections that occupy eighty-seven pages; James Joyce with four selections over seventy-five pages; D. H. Lawrence, twelve pieces over forty-eight pages; Edith Sitwell, four poems over nine pages; and T. S. Eliot, nine poems and two prose selections over forty-seven pages. Forster, the oldest of that sextet, has been represented with but a single short story, "The Road from Colonus" (1911), extending over eight pages. One wonders how long before Forster will, as has his rival and contemporary W. Somerset Maugham, fade from the pages of the anthologies and onto the shelf of "interesting" but merely second level writers of the twentieth century.
Honors and awards came first to Forster following the publication of A Passage to India. That novel earned him the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Prix Femina Vie Heureuse (both 1925). In addition, he received honorary doctorates from the University of Aberdeen (1931), the University of Liverpool (1947), Hamilton (New York) College (1949), Cambridge University (1950), the University of Nottingham (1951), the University of Manchester (1954), Leiden University (1954), and the University of Leicester (1958). Other awards came in the form of the Tukojimo III Gold Medal, the Companion of Honour (1953), the Order of Merit (1969; on his ninetieth birthday), and the Companion of the Royal Society of Literature. Forster held honorary corresponding memberships in the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts, and served as president of the Cambridge Humanists.
Critical commentary on Forster's work has always issued forth in a steady stream, spurred on, of late, because of attempts by scholars in the several academic disciplines to probe the psychological, social, and literary dimensions of gay and lesbian literature--or literature by gays and lesbians. As one would expect, the vast portion of the early criticism--from 1924 until Forster's death in 1970--focused principally upon A Passage to India and Aspects of the Novel, while Maurice has engaged the fancies of the majority of those most recently interested in Forster. Additional interest in Forster's work has been shown by scholars probing such diverse, contemporary critical problems as stylistic research, the spirit of place, and theories of narration.

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