E. M. Forster’s World

The death of E. M. Forster sent me back to a book that was published in 1918, A Novelist on Novels. It was written by W. L. George, a good friend of mine who died young and is now in large part forgotten but was a person of genuine importance in his day. In one of the chapters, “Who Is the Man?,” he wonders which of the younger novelists would be occupying in 1950 the positions currently held by Thomas Hardy, Arnold Bennett, H. G. Wells, John Galsworthy and Joseph Conrad. “Who,” he asked, “will be presented by university extension lecturers as representative of the English novel during the Georgian decades?”

He named seven possible successors “among whom two or three leaders will be found.” E. M. Forster was of course one of them; a page and a quarter is devoted to him. “He has,” George wrote, “been forgotten a little in a hurry because he has not, since 1910, felt inclined to publish a novel. He is still one of the young men, while it is not at all certain that he is not ‘the’ young man … if he chooses to return to the field he will establish his claim.”

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Alec Waugh

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The death of E. M. Forster sent me back to a book that was published in 1918, A Novelist on Novels. It was written by W. L. George, a good friend of mine who died young and is now in large part forgotten but was a person of genuine importance in his day. In one of the chapters, “Who Is the Man?,” he wonders which of the younger novelists would be occupying in 1950 the positions currently held by Thomas Hardy, Arnold Bennett, H. G. Wells, John Galsworthy and Joseph Conrad. “Who,” he asked, “will be presented by university extension lecturers as representative of the English novel during the Georgian decades?”

He named seven possible successors “among whom two or three leaders will be found.” E. M. Forster was of course one of them; a page and a quarter is devoted to him. “He has,” George wrote, “been forgotten a little in a hurry because he has not, since 1910, felt inclined to publish a novel. He is still one of the young men, while it is not at all certain that he is not ‘the’ young man … if he chooses to return to the field he will establish his claim.”