Briti kirjanduse portfoolio
difference and hypocrisy in early 20th-century British society. Forster's humanistic impulse
toward understanding and sympathy may be aptly summed up in the epigraph to his 1910
novel Howards End: "Only connect".
Forster was homosexual, but this fact was not widely made public during his lifetime. His
posthumously-published novel Maurie tells of the coming of age of an explicitly homosexual
male character.
Forster was born at 6 Melcombe Place, Dorset Square, London. He attended Tonbridge
School in Kent as a day boy. The theatre at the school is named after him. King's College,
Cambridge between 1897 and 1901, he became a member of the Apostles.
After leaving university he travelled on the continent with his mother. He visited Egypt,
Germany and India with the classicist Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson in 1914. Forster spent a
second spell in India in the early 1920s as the private secretary to the Maharajah of Dewas.
The Hill of Devi is his non-fictional account of this trip