This volume contains 30 broadcasts and 40 uncollected essays, talks and lectures written by E.M. Forster between his time as a 19th-century undergraduate and his candid old age, when, in his eighties, he jotted down a memorandum about his sex life. The broadcasts and essays fill about three hundred pages of this collection, which means some five hundred pages are occupied by appendices, a bibliography and, above all, annotations. These are scrupulous but frequently more discursive than some might think the occasion requires, as when the late Edward Said is chastised at length for his errant opinion of A Passage to India. Forster's devotees, a party that includes the present editor, are clearly unwilling to treat the paralipomena of an admired author as undeserving of the fullest canonical attention. It so happens that another vast collection of what Max Müller might have called chips from a writer's workshop has appeared at more or less at the same moment as this one.* It is equally scrupulous though perhaps less arduously discursive.

LRB 25 September 2008 | PDF Download