![]() ![]() It reflects many of the currents of thought that were present in the Edwardian period. Forster does acknowledge Howards End to be his “best novel approaching a good novel,” but he immediately states “I do not care for it: not a single character in it for whom I care” (Forster CB 203-4) While time has been kinder to Howards End than Forster was to it himself, the novel is in many ways, very much tied to the time in which it was written. ![]() ![]() What does exist is generally self-deprecating and reproachful. Forster’s private musings, however, contain precious little commentary about his own work. If anything, it demonstrates the extent to which Forster was one of the most well read men of his generation, with citations ranging from the early Church Fathers to Proust, Eliot, Defoe, Fielding, Beaumont and Flecher, Lawrence, Tolstoy, and, briefly, Richard Wagner. For a writer whose work, “more completely than for most writers,” according to editor Philip Gardener, “is his monument,” the availability of Forster’s diary cum reading log allows insight into many of the forces that shaped the novelist’s work (Forster CB xii). Forster’s Commonplace Book in 1978 allowed researchers access, for the first time, into the mind of one of the 20th Century’s most important novelists. ![]()
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