A Passage to India by E. M. Forster
“Why can’t we be friends now?” said the other, holding him affectionately. “It’s what I want. It’s what you want.”
But the horses didn’t want it—they swerved apart; the earth didn’t want it, sending up rocks through which riders must pass single file; the temples, the tank, the jail, the palace, the birds, the carrion, the Guest House, that came into view as they issued from the gap and saw Mau beneath: they didn’t want it, they said in their hundred voices, “No, not yet,” and the sky said, “No, not there.”
WEYBRIDGE, 1924.
About the Author
Born on New Year�s Day in 1879 in London, Edmund Morgan Forster was raised by his mother and great aunt. He graduated from Cambridge University in 1901 and spent the next ten years living abroad in India, Italy and elsewhere. His experiences abroad would provide Forster with material for his novels, particularly A Room with a View and A Passage to India.
In 1905 Forster published his first novel, Where Angels Fear to Tread, and then followed it with The Longest Journey in 1907 and A Room with a View in 1908. He achieved his first breakthrough success with the publication of Howard�s End in 1910, which many people still regard as his greatest work. During this time, Forster was associated with a group of writers, artists and intellectuals known as the Bloomsbury Group. Including such luminaries as Virginia Woolf, Benjamin Britten, Roger Fry and John Maynard Keynes, the Bloomsbury Group was a source of intellectual and cultural stimulation for the young novelist.
In 1924, Forster published A Passage to India, widely regarded as one of the most important English novels of the twentieth century. In the opinion of many critics, A Passage to India signals Forster�s growing disillusionment with the solutions offered by traditional liberalism. This disillusionment, perhaps not surprisingly, coincides with the author�s waning interest in the novel; in fact, A Passage to India was the last novel Forster finished.
Instead, he turned his attention to teaching and criticism, beginning with the Clark Lectures he delivered at Cambridge 1927. Those lectures would form the basis of his widely-admired book of essays, Aspects of the Novel, published the following year. In 1946, he accepted a fellowship at Cambridge University, where he remained until his death in 1970.
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