regshoe | Entries tagged with author: e. m. forster

Mr Fortune's Maggot by Sylvia Townsend Warner (1927). A kind of weird book which I am finding it difficult to say much about. It's about an English missionary, Mr Fortune, in the Pacific Islands; the islanders cheerfully ignore his attempts to convert them, but he makes one apparent convert, a boy called Lueli, and Mr Fortune and Lueli end up kind of loving each other very much while also basically failing to understand each other. STW's books are always completely different from each other and also very distinctively her every time, and this one is no different; but I think the emotional distance in it did not really work for me. Hmm. Townsend Warner admits in the foreword not having done much research about the actual Pacific Islands, which perhaps didn't help; for a story that's generally critical of the typical perspectives of English missionaries it didn't seem to understand or really be very interested in the islanders' own points of view.

Re-read Where Angels Fear to Tread by E. M. Forster (1905). I remembered this book as being good but not grabbing me emotionally the way some of Forster's other books do, and as being what I'd call literarily homoerotic rather than fannishly slashy (whereas I think The Longest Journey is both). I felt the same way this time, pretty much! Definitely worth reading—I love Forster's prose and observational skills, I did like Philip especially, and there's definitely something in Philip/Gino—but not one of my faves. It's sort of similar to Mr Fortune's Maggot in a funny way—they're both about clashes between English culture and a very different foreign one, and both somewhat limited by not really being able to get properly into the perspective of the other culture.

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel (2009). A fairly famous recent historical novel about Thomas Cromwell, a prominent figure from the reign of Henry VIII; the main plot takes place from the 1520s to 1535, as Cromwell survives the downfall of Cardinal Wolsey and navigates the whole Henry-Katherine of Aragon-Anne Boleyn situation. I found the writing style difficult to get on with: it stays closely in Cromwell's head as the POV character while also being quite indirect about what's actually happening, and it's very much the sort of prose that you have to work to see the story through. Mantel's deployment of pronouns gets confusing at times (she's oddly reluctant to use Cromwell's name in the narration, so you often have to stop and puzzle out whether a 'he' which structurally seems like it ought to refer to another character is actually Cromwell; but then sometimes she does use Cromwell's name after all, and sometimes it's distracting overuse of 'he, Cromwell' instead; etc.), and dialogue tags are frequently insufficient. Apparently this book has been criticised for being too pro-Cromwell and making him too likeable, which rather surprised me; the narrative of this book clearly respects Cromwell and thinks he's worth taking seriously, but I would not have called him a very likeable character. A lot of historical research went into it, and I did enjoy the historical detail and complexity very much—especially the bits about the Reformation, in how they combine Cromwell's personal religious beliefs and the background of early Protestantism with the political complications of everything in England. I already knew something about the sweating sickness—the mysterious disease to which Cromwell's wife and two young daughters, among others, succumbed—what a fascinating historical mystery. Henry is a complicatedly difficult tyrant; the book does not seem very sympathetic to either Katherine or Anne, which—without knowing very much about them, but being aware that more complex interpretations are possible—is a bit disappointing. It ends with the downfall and execution of Thomas More (whom Mantel portrays as an eerily recognisable type of slimily arrogant Catholic—I was not surprised to discover that she was raised Catholic, left and later became highly critical of the Church), and Cromwell arranging for Henry and his court to visit Wolf Hall, the seat of the Seymour family, which has hitherto been curiously absent from a book named after it. Here, one presumes, Henry will meet Jane Seymour, and further drama will ensue in the book's two sequels—which I may read at some point.

Also read Christabel by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1816), a short story-length narrative poem which

flo_nelja recced as being femslashy in a similar way to Carmilla. That's very accurate, it is weird and disturbing and properly femslashy, and I am hoping to request f/f for it in

once_upon_fic. :D

The last few books of the year, plus a couple that I read for Yuletide reasons and hence didn't post about at the time. :)

Re-read Persuasion by Jane Austen (1817). Aww, this one was very well worth a re-read—one of my favourites by Austen, I think. I love Anne very much, and I enjoy the quiet and powerful longing of the developing relationship, and of course I love Sophia Croft and her husband very much too. I was also especially struck this time by the sense of a wider world beyond the limited social sphere of the immediate events, which all the naval characters and discussion of Navy life provide. Yeah, these books are actually set in the same world as the Hornblower novels, I can see it...

Irresolute Catherine by Violet Jacob (1908). This was a disappointment, I'm afraid! It's another one set in contemporary Wales; the title Catherine was engaged to one man, broke it off and later became engaged to another man, but at the time the book opens is still wavering between them. Although, to be fair to Jacob, the one Catherine ultimately chooses is less bad than the other, neither love interest is an especially good prospect—they're both possessively jealous in the really unappealing way, and both run roughshod over Catherine's 'irresoluteness'. Also I really disliked the way the important moment of Catherine's gaining the courage to make her own choices is inspired by a) a factually incorrect belief about one of her love interests treating her badly, instead of the various correct instances she could have come to recognise, b) jealousy of another woman who is described and treated by the narrative in decidedly unfeministical terms.

Cousin Phillis and Other Stories by Elizabeth Gaskell (written and originally published from 1850 to 1864; this collection published 2010). This was a bit of a puzzle; according to my reading log I read at least the novella 'Cousin Phillis' itself in 2016, but reading it again now I did not remember or recognise anything about it (and I can remember at least a little about all the other books I read around the same time and haven't re-read since). Is Gaskell particularly unmemorable? I wouldn't have thought so. No idea whether I read the other stories then too. Anyway, this is a collection of short stories plus one novella, mostly dealing with Gaskell's favourite theme of changes in society in the first half of the nineteenth century as experienced in the northwest of England, especially Manchester and its environs. I enjoyed them on the whole! One story is a sympathetic take on the problem of the unmarried mother, with interesting differences from the novel Ruth. A couple more, including 'Cousin Phillis', deal with women being jilted by men and subsequently remaining single; the men involved are too much Really Not Worth It to see the stories as especially tragic, but they're enjoyable, and the rural northwestern settings are very nice.

The Killing of the Red Fox: An Investigation into the Appin Murder by Seamus Carney (1989). Good readable account of the Appin murder and its surroundings. Much of the detail of the trial was not new to me, having already read the trial records, but Carney puts some things in context that I hadn't fully understood and adds a lot of interesting background material which was new to me (apart from having seen some of it in

muccamukk's meta posts!). Among other things, definite primary evidence for historical Allan Breck's age at the time of the murder being about thirty, the fact that at least one witness provably lied at the trial so as to incriminate Allan, and more thorough information about Allan's later life and French military career than anyone else seems to have turned up. (I have begun adding this to his Wikipedia article.) Having gone through the history, Carney summarises what other people have since written about the murder, calling Kidnapped 'an adventure yarn that will endure as long as the art of narrative'; he then gives his own judgements on the mystery, concluding that a) the shot was fired by Allan Breck and b) while it's not certain that James of the Glens wasn't involved, he probably wasn't, and the jury were certainly not justified in convicting him based on the available evidence; and finally sets out a speculative theory of exactly what happened, in which Allan Breck planned the murder in concert with James's eldest son Allan Beg Stewart and an unknown third man, without James's knowledge. So there you go.

And for Yuletide...

Superstitions of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland by John Gregorson Campbell (1900). Read as research for my supernatural Kidnapped story! Much of the book is about the fairies, and this gave me lots of good material, but I was enjoying it enough to continue onto the rest, which covers other superstitions such as the Glaistig (supernatural beings associated with particular places; I'm sure Ardroy has one) and the water-horse (my goodness, Highland water-horses are brutal! Brrr). Gregorson Campbell thoroughly disapproves of superstition, and occasionally gets sidetracked from the accounts of supernatural creatures and folktales to go on a digression explaining this to the reader; this made an entertaining contrast with Robert Kirk of The Secret Commonwealth, who believes what he's writing about.

And re-read Howards End by E. M. Forster (1910) Oh, I love this book. ♥ Characters, settings, themes, prose, all really wonderful. Of course I was canon-reviewing to write Margaret/Ruth femslash, so I especially paid attention to them, and I love them both and their relationship very much; I was also especially struck by Miss Avery, who so well understands what's going on and sees everything right in the end.

False Goddesses by Rachel Ferguson (1923). This is Rachel Ferguson's first novel, and is about two things: firstly, the Edwardian-era theatrical world and the experiences of young middle-class women who go on the stage; secondly, lesbian crushes. If this sounds like a promising combination, the historical stuff is really pretty interesting—it's full of precise and thoroughly-observed detail, something which Ferguson is very good at, and she was writing directly from experience here—but the emotional side of the book did not really work for me. I think this was partly because I never really warmed up to Leah, the protagonist, and so couldn't really get into her relationships emotionally; and partly because Ferguson's writing style—which skips breathlessly between details and incidents, turns a sharply-elegant phrase and passes loosely and somewhat confusingly through time—while it works very well indeed in a novel like Alas, Poor Lady, is not so well suited to describing passionate emotions like those here. Altogether worth reading, but not what I might have hoped.

The Dynamiter by Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny Van de Grift Stevenson (1885). This was another slightly strange partial disappointment! It's a sequel to New Arabian Nights, loosely defined, and is more of a coherent whole than that book, with the stories all interlinked and revealing a single overarching plot by the end. It is about Fenian terrorism—hence the dynamite of the title—and the strange characters who get involved in it, and I think I never really got into the book's mood. Either it can't quite make a definite statement in the detail the subject matter deserves, or decide how far it is a serious statement and how far a light-hearted satirical comedy, or I was missing too much of the social and political context to understand what the authors were saying. (Also I am slightly surprised, given his attitudes towards the Highlands in Kidnapped, to learn that RLS was apparently vehemently against Irish independence.) However, there are good things in it, especially its female characters: the book is in three parts, each of which could be summarised as, 'male protagonist meets a weird woman; she tells him her life story; drama and intrigue follow', and it is entertaining. Perhaps that's thanks to Fanny! At one point there's what looks like a parody of the 'sudden backstory Mormons' trope from e.g. A Study in Scarlet. Via the book's Wikipedia article I found this website, about an academic project using stylometry to analyse Louis's and Fanny's distinct writing styles and investigate the authorship of this book, which is fascinating. (

sanguinity, have the Holmestice people ever tried doing this to identify anonymous exchange authors???) For myself I couldn't distinguish any obviously different writing styles, either while reading the book or after learning which bits of it each of them apparently wrote—probably partly because RLS's style is so versatile that it's difficult to tell what's different because it's a different author!

And re-read The Longest Journey by E. M. Forster (1907) for RMSE! I read this book several times years ago and have loved it very dearly ever since I first did, but hadn't revisited it for a while, so that was a very good and also interesting opportunity. I think I'm much less mystified by Forster's writing than I was when I first read his books—I remember reading this and feeling amazed at its resonant significance but only getting a little way towards articulating what it was doing, and now I read it and I can see Forster making choices and achieving effects in the way a writer does, very skilfully but no longer mysteriously. Perhaps that's being a little older, perhaps it's having more experience writing myself? I do still think it's terribly significant! It's a weird, gloomy book with a tragic ending—a tragic ending that seems a little less inevitable than it used to, albeit on the straightforward 'how things could happen' level rather than the narrative level—and some of its ideas are very strange, and it never seems quite certain of how to deal with the significant questions it asks, but my goodness, who ever wrote about weird gloomy tragedy and uncertainty and failure more beautifully? I love this book, and I love Rickie. It's still meaningful in a way the triumphantly happy ending of a Maurice never could be. And, although the sadness and unresolution of the story are so important to me in some ways, I do think Rickie and Stewart could have been happy together if things had gone a bit differently...

I've been in a bit of a reading slump for a couple of weeks, and I decided to drag myself out of it by re-reading Howards End, a book I love very much. I think it's probably E. M. Forster's best book, and it would be my favourite if it wasn't for The Longest Journey (which I adore unreasonably).

I don't feel coherent enough about it to write a proper review, but here are some scattered thoughts:

The whole thing is very much temperamentally conservative, without being at all friendly to political conservatism (to the point where it almost feels wrong to call Wilcoxes 'conservative', although it's how they think of themselves these days). As someone who is (/likes to think I am) politically and socially progressive, it's easy to feel frustrated by the sense that I can't have those 'conservative' values (it's better for life to be slow and quiet, places are important, particular history is important, telegrams and anger bad, etc.) without a whole load of other, utterly horrible ones, and this book is a much needed reminder of how false that is.
Places are important! A thousand square miles are not a thousand times better than one square mile. The idea that the 'civilisation of luggage'—the tendency of the modern middle classes (in 1910, but I think you could just as easily, if not more so, say the same now) to treat places as fungible and meaningless and to see constantly moving around as unremarkable and harmless—is a bad thing connected to real, serious loss was something I really needed to hear someone else taking seriously when I first read this book, and it's still a great comfort now.
It contains no overtly supernatural elements, and still manages to be one of the most compelling, beautiful and fitting ghost stories I've ever read.
The writing style is utterly gorgeous. As well as the individual beautiful poetic passages (perhaps a little overdone in places, but I can forgive them that), I love the way Forster picks up a few central phrases and images—'telegrams and anger', 'panic and emptiness', 'only connect', 'goblin footfalls', and so on—and repeats and echoes them in pivotal places throughout the book. It gives a real sense of symbolic weight that's at the same time interwoven with the surface of the story, its characters and events. I think this is a book that does a very good job, on the whole, of working on multiple levels at once.
Forster's determined and unequivocal anti-car sentiment. He's right and I support him.
Margaret and Helen Schlegel are two of my favourite characters in literature. I love them both in all their complications and contradictions and differences.
I have seen the Merchant Ivory film adaptation and it's very good—I thought it captured the mood of the book wonderfully. I have not seen the more recent miniseries adaptation, and am now considering watching it. Has anyone seen it, and if so do you think it's any good?

Anyway, I'm now reading George Monbiot's How Did We Get Into This Mess? and trying to do a compare-and-contrast on the political and social values. It's great fun, if somewhat depressing.

4. Least favourite book by favourite author.

I'm a bit stumped on this one. It's not as though none of my faves has ever written a subpar book, of course—several of my favourite authors have some books that I think are a bit lacklustre, or that I don't like as much as the others, but none of them has anything that I really strongly dislike in a way that's interesting to blog about. However, here are a couple I have thoughts on...

Quartet in Autumn by Barbara Pym. I love Pym's books in general for their mood, outlook and attitudes, the sort of quietly insightful, wryly sympathetic portrayal of everyday life. They're certainly not all rose-tinted optimism, but there's a kind of comforting depth to them. This one didn't feel like that, for some reason—it came across as far more bleak and cynical than any of her other books. I'm not sure why. I think her later books in general are a little bleaker than the early ones—Pym's career is split in two by her having been dropped by her publisher and only being 'rediscovered' about fifteen years later—and Quartet in Autumn is the first of the later books, so perhaps it felt worse from the contrast. Perhaps it's simply that she's writing about bleaker aspects of life here than those she's usually concerned with, and that naturally changes the mood. In any case, I didn't enjoy this one as much as those either before or after it.

A Room With a View by E. M. Forster. This may be an unpopular choice! And I do think it's a very good book, like all of Forster's books. I think my main problem with it is the way it conflates symbol and substance—like, there's a difference between 'women should be free to live the lives they want, and men trying to control and constrain women is bad' and 'a woman being forcefully kissed by someone she's not sure she wants to kiss is a good thing' which I feel is elided just a little. That's very uncharitable of me, because of course Forster doesn't really mean that—and there are plenty of passages in the book that make that clear!—but there's still too much of a resemblance for me to be wholly in favour. And the particular ways these good general principles are conflated with specific examples that in other contexts are often bad happen to clash especially badly with my own preferences and experiences (as someone who is not a Very Uninhibited heterosexual woman). Where I like Forster's writing best, he's doing the exact opposite of this for me (my favourite of his books is The Longest Journey, and I may at some point write a long weird post about why), but I think I find his writing more personally sympathetic when he's being miserable than when he's trying to be light and optimistic.

That turned out more interesting than I thought it might! Just goes to show why these sorts of prompt memes can be so useful, I suppose...

Originally posted here on Tumblr.

From The Ladies of Grace Adieu, by Susanna Clarke:

“I am a human child and all the vast stony, rainy English earth belongs to me. I am an English child and all the wide grey English air, full of black wings beating and grey ghosts of rain sighing, belongs to me. This being so, Robin Goodfellow, tell me, why should I be afraid?”

From Maurice, by E. M. Forster:

But England belonged to them. That, besides companionship, was their reward. Her air and sky were theirs, not the timorous millions’ who own stuffy little boxes, but never their own souls.

…I’d write a long sensible post about the parallels here, and how these very different books are really saying similar things: both are about the very people who are oppressed and marginalised by English society taking back symbolic ownership of the land itself, whether that’s done using magic or otherwise (it’s significant that the first quote is probably not something John Uskglass ever actually says, but a story told about him centuries later by the magicians of England — this is how they choose to remember him), but I’m not literary enough to do that, so have this ‘put the quotes together and point at them emphatically’ thing instead.

Tags: why should i be afraid?, on a related note, margaret ford and donata torel etc. were literally 'those who took to the greenwood', which i have decided is a good reason to ship them