S9E8: E. M. Forster
Live from Sheffield DocFest, it's E. M. Forster: who in his 91 years of life was one of Britain’s most successful novelists. He was raised in a climate of Victorian propriety so extreme he went to university without understanding human reproduction, and then fell in with a secret society known for alternative thinking and "aggressive" homosexuality. Italy — and later India — represented paradises of freedom and liberation in comparison to the cramped, horrid Edwardian upper middle classes. Erotic contact with the working-class/brown Other was the waters of Lourdes for this uptight Englishman, who was never able to transcend his own position.
SOURCES
Wendy Moffat, E. M. Forster: A New Life (Bloomsbury, 2010).
https://www.varsity.co.uk/features/25279
http://www.glbtqarchive.com/ssh/cambridge_apostles_S.pdf
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2014/11/06/forster-love-story/
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/03/23/man-with-a-past
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/feb/17/e-m-forster-my-policeman
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v35/n01/alan-hollinghurst/poor-dear-how-she-figures
https://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/25/books/review/Toibin-t.html
Our intro music is Arpeggia Colorix by Yann Terrien, downloaded from WFMU's Free Music Archive and distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. Our outro music is by DJ Michaeloswell Graphicsdesigner.