The Life to Come: And Other Short Stories

E. M. Forster

Sep 2015 · Rosetta Books

About this ebook

From the literary icon, author of Howard’s End and A Passage to India, comes a posthumous collection of short works, many never before published.
 
Featuring fourteen short stories, The Life to Come spans six decades of E. M. Forster’s literary career, tracking every phase of his development. Never having sought publication for most of the stories—only two were published in his lifetime—Forster worried his career would suffer because of their overtly homosexual themes. Instead they were shown to an appreciative circle of friends and fellow writers, including Christopher Isherwood, Siegfried Sassoon, Lytton Strachey, and T. E. Lawrence.
 
With stories that are lively and amusing (“What Does It Matter?”; “The Obelisk”), and others that are more somber and thought-provoking (“Dr Woolacott”; “Arthur Snatchfold”), The Life to Come sheds a light on Forster’s powerful but suppressed explorations beyond the strictures of conventional society.
 
“Have we been as ready for Forster’s honesty as we thought we were? His greatness surely had root in his capacity to treat all human relationships seriously and truthfully. . . . Even the earliest and most ephemeral of them will be recognized as the frailer embodiments of the same passionate convictions that made for the moral iron of his novels.” —Eudora Welty, The New York Times Book Review

About the author

E.M. Forster published his first novel, Where Angels Fear to Tread, in 1905, which was quickly followed in 1907 by The Longest Journey and then in 1908 by A Room with a View. Forster’s major breakthrough came in 1910 with the book Howard’s End. Forster was associated with the Bloomsbury Group, a collective of intellectuals and peers, including Virginia Woolf, Benjamin Britten, Roger Fry, and John Maynard Keynes. The 1924 publication of A Passage to India firmly cemented Forster in the literary firmament as one of the most important writers of the twentieth century. It was the last novel Forster ever completed. Forster then turned his attention to teaching and criticism; his Clark Lectures, delivered at Cambridge in 1927, were gathered into a much-admired collection of essays on writing published as Aspects of the Novel. In 1946, Forster accepted a fellowship at Cambridge where he remained until his death in 1970. Forster’s other writings include The Hill of Devi, an account of his experience as secretary in the Indian state of Dewas Senior; Pharos and Pharillon, a group of essays about Alexandria originally published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf; Maurice, a novel on homosexual love; and The Life to Come, a collection of short stories.