edward morgan forster a passage to india

Early in the new twentieth century it also enabled him to live independently while he established his career as a writer.įorster grew up in the English countryside north of London, where he had a happy early childhood. This large amount of money eventually paid for Forster's education and his early travels. The boy was raised by his mother, grandmother, and his father's aunt, who left Forster the sum of 8,000 pounds in her will. His father, an architect, died when Forster was only a year old. However, although he had continued to write short stories as well as another novel, Maurice (published in 1971, after Forster's death), he published little in the decade after Howards End.īorn in London on January 1, 1879, E. Between 19 he had published four well-crafted Edwardian novels of upper-middle class life and manners: Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), The Longest Journey (1907), A Room With a View (1908), and Howards End (1910). When Edward Morgan Forster completed A Passage to India, he was in his mid-forties and was already a respected and relatively successful novelist.

Not only do many scholars,Ĭritics, and other writers consider it a classic of early twentieth-century fiction, but in a survey of readers conducted by Waterstone's Bookstore and Channel 4 television in Britain at the end of 1996, it was voted as one of the '100 Greatest Books of the Century.' Author Biography More than seventy years later, it remains highly regarded.

The year after its publication, the novel received two prestigious literary awards-the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Prix Femina Vie Heureuse. Despite some criticism that Forster had depicted the British unfairly, the book was popular with readers in both Britain and the United States. When A Passage to India appeared in 1924, it was praised by reviewers in a number of important British and American literary journals. Although the charges against Aziz are dropped during his trial, the gulf between the British and native Indians grows wider than ever, and the novel ends on an ambiguous note. Fielding, a British teacher, helps to defend Aziz. Aziz is accused of attempting to rape a young Englishwoman. Aziz, a young Indian physician whose attempt to establish friendships with several British characters has disastrous consequences. On a more symbolic level, the novel also addresses questions of faith (both religious faith and faith in social conventions). It is also about the necessity of friendship, and about the difficulty of establishing friendship across cultural boundaries. On the surface, it is about India-which at the time was a colonial possession of Britain-and about the relations between British and Indian people in that country. Subtle and rich in symbolism, the novel works on several levels. Forster's first novel in fourteen years, and the last novel he wrote. A Passage to India, published in 1924, was E.

Edward morgan forster a passage to india