E. M. Forster’s Earlier Short Writings

Abstract

So grateful was E. M. Forster for the Independent Review that he dedicated his first collection of stories, The Celestial Omnibus, to its memory in 1912. Four of the six stories in it had been published in the Independent Review, whose editorial board included his Cambridge mentors Dickinson and Wedd, and he would use another as the title story for his second collection, The Eternal Moment, in 1928. But it was not as a short-story writer that Forster began to be read by his contemporaries in the New Liberal journal which touched decency with poetry. The first two contributions of Forster’s to appear in the Independent Review were informal essays. Over the next five years he contributed five short stories, two brief historical biographies, a travel sketch, and a review. The diversity of these texts brought inquiries as to whether ‘E. M. Forster’ was a pseudonym, perhaps, of Hilaire Belloc’s. An editorial note in the October 1905 issue asserted firmly that ‘all Mr. Forster’s contributions to this Review are signed by his own name’ (PNF/EMF, I 109). As with Strachey’s early work, the mixture of genres in these texts and the circumstances of their publication are part of Bloomsbury’s literary history.