Novels of E.M. Forster

Excerpt from the Introduction: Although he has published only five novels, E.M. Forster maintains a high rank among the writers of fiction in the twentieth century. Yet for a writer whose works have been consistently accepted as among the best the first half of the century has produced, it is remarkable how inadequate has been the criticism dealing with him.\ The portion of Forster's novels which deals essential with the world of human relationships, the world of human reality, is not difficult to analyze; and it is indeed an important element in his fiction. That is is but a portion, however, and that the world of human reality is ever contrasted with another reality any reader of him is aware. Forster's interest in both the human and transcendent realities accounts for what his friend G. Lowes Dickinson has termed his kind of "double vision," a sense of "this world, and a world or worlds behind." These "worlds behind" cannot be ignored or given a minor position by the critic, for in Forster the sense of the transcendent realm consistently affects and colors the physical realms.