Selected Letters of E.M. Forster: Volume Two: 1921-1970

The letters of the last half of E. M. Forster's life are as engaging as those of his earlier years. Imbued with the same wit, warmth, and vitality, they reveal the breadth of his interests and the great range and enduring quality of his friendships.

After a second trip to India in 1921, Forster finally finished the Indian novel he had begun years before. A Passage to India (1924) capped his career as a novelist; he then turned his energies to essays and other nonfictional prose. In the 1930s he emerged as an active journalist, writing and broadcasting on social and political issues. He fought for civil liberties and led a successful campaign against the BBC's political blacklisting of performers. His correspondents during these years included T. S. Eliot, Siegfried Sassoon, Lennard and Virginia Woolf, Christopher Isherwood, and Stephen Spender.

At seventy Forster began along, happy, and productive new period in his life with his work on the libretto for Benjamin Britten's opera Billy Budd. In 1960 he was a leading defense witness in the Lady Chatterley trial. By then he was a revered figure among literati and enjoyed advising younger writers. In these last decades he divided his time between his rooms at King's College, Cambridge, and the home of his friends the Buckinghams in Coventry, where he died at age ninety-one.

Forster delighted in letter writing, had a passionate belief in friendship (and a rare gift for it) and generally aimed at amusing his correspondents, facts that go far to explain the vitality, charm and variety of these letters...There are gossipy, richly descriptive letters to his mother and aunts; letters to literary friends the likes of G. L. Dickinson, Cavafy and the Woolfs that grapple with ethical or literary questions and are variously serious, witty and prankish; and letters to a few special friends that touch on the homosexual themes of his 'unpublishable' novel Maurice. Through most of the correspondence shine Forster's antipathy to respectability and his talent for the unexpected. (Publishers Weekly)

These letters confirm and broaden Mr. Furbank's portrait of a witty and complex man, passionate in his attachments, reflective and intelligent in his attitudes and beliefs, insecure in his periods of introspection and self-doubt. (The Economist)

Forster was in fact a born letter-writer...Certain qualities in the letters are fairly constant. They are amusing, but their wit rests on a foundation of seriousness; fastidious, but their good manners are tempered by a light irreverence and a raciness which stops just short of slang. (The Observer)