E.M. Forster at home in Cambridge

Making peace with the past

E.M. Forster in his rooms at King’s College Cambridge, 1949 [EMF/27/613]

Marianne Thornton was the great-aunt of the English author E.M. Forster. The legacy she left him in 1887 meant that he could study at King’s College Cambridge as a young man, and later travel to Italy where he was inspired to write A Room With a View (1908). In the 1950s he returned to King’s as an Honorary Fellow, and lived in a set of spacious rooms there until his death in 1970s. He decided to research and write a biography of Marianne Thornton as a way of paying tribute to her, and finding out more about his own past.¹ The final section contains Forster’s only published memoir about his own young life, and offers a revealing glimpse of the much-loved childhood home in Hertfordshire that inspired Howard’s End (1910).

My essay below first appeared in Issue 58 of Slightly Foxed: The Real Reader’s Quarterly. Slightly Foxed have kindly given permission for me to reprint it here.