A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life of E. M. Forster
*Starred Review* It will come as no surprise to readers of literary fiction that E. M. Forster (1879–1970), author of such classic novels as Howards End (1910) and Passage to India (1924), was gay. His sexual orientation has been noted since the 1970 publication of his posthumous novel, Maurice, which was about love and sex between men. But Moffat places, more firmly than has been done by previous biographers, Forster’s homosexuality at the core of his being, both as the lodestar by which he lived his life and as a source of intense frustration because of social prohibition against depicting it in fiction. He realized early on his attraction to his own gender, and we are given, with no hint of salaciousness, an honest account of his sex life over the years. At once powerful and sensitive, Moffat’s irresistibly compelling and responsible biography sees an unimpressive physical persona whose shyness reduced him to “disappearing into the woodwork.” And his long public silence—silent in that he published no more novels while he lived, after Passage to India—can be attributed to his having “grown tired of the masquerade of propriety.” Forster may have been regarded as mousy, but this treatment of his life is undeniably robust. In fact, it shines with the beauty its subject was made sad that he did not possess. --Brad Hooper--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.