Abinger Harvest

by E.M. Forster, Elizabeth Heine (Editor)

One of England's most distinguished authors (Room with a View, A Passage to India, Howard's End) favors us with this delightful collection of articles, essays, reviews and poems penned over 30 years. The collection contains such acclaimed pieces as Notes on the English Character, Adrift in India and Me, Them and You.

"One of the most exquisite pleasures in the contemporary market." (Saturday Review of Literature)

Genres: Essays, Nonfiction, Poetry, Literature, Literary Fiction, 20th Century, Criticism

464 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1936

About the author

Edward Morgan Forster, generally published as E.M. Forster, was an English novelist, essayist, and short story writer. He is known best for his ironic and well-plotted novels examining class difference and hypocrisy in early 20th-century British society. His humanistic impulse toward understanding and sympathy may be aptly summed up in the epigraph to his 1910 novel Howards End: "Only connect".

He had five novels published in his lifetime, achieving his greatest success with A Passage to India (1924) which takes as its subject the relationship between East and West, seen through the lens of India in the later days of the British Raj.

Forster's views as a secular humanist are at the heart of his work, which often depicts the pursuit of personal connections in spite of the restrictions of contemporary society. He is noted for his use of symbolism as a technique in his novels, and he has been criticised for his attachment to mysticism. His other works include Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), The Longest Journey (1907), A Room with a View (1908) and Maurice (1971), his posthumously published novel which tells of the coming of age of an explicitly gay male character.

Reviews

[♣ Irish Smurfétté ♣]

My copy is a 1955 paperback Meridian Books edition.

[Gille Liath · Rating 3 out of 5]

Orwell once said that everything he had written – from a certain point onwards – had been, directly or indirectly, in favour of democratic Socialism. And the attentive reader of his work will see that this is true – true whether the subject be cookery, football, gardening, comic postcards or anything else. Not that these subjects are mere pretexts, his interest in them is genuine, but what he has to say about them is always coloured by his overriding concern, his political passion.

That is what a great essayist needs: a strong, distinctive ‘voice’, and an overall vision of life with which to shape each particular subject. And that’s precisely what EM Forster lacks. Although his stories are punctuated by moments of melodrama, he was basically a novelist of Little England, of small things, small people who do not make extravagant speeches or gestures, affections developing gently in the shade. And within the novel, it works; the little things ‘join hands’ as he says, and seem to add up to something more.

But not here. The comment about joining hands comes from an essay on Jane Austen (this piece, and the one on TS Eliot, show that he lacked neither intelligence nor literary insight). Much the same criticism he levels at Austen could be made of these essays: too much focus on those little things, without the overall vision (or as he has it, ‘frame’) to give the pattern coherence and interest. All he has to offer is Englishness, decent, genial, quiet, whimsical, tired Englishness (I think it was this very quality that recommended the book to Thomas Merton, who loved it; it must have made him nostalgic for the village greens of his childhood). He says of other writers, with approval, that they are ‘fundamentally unserious’; and you feel that this is also true of his essays, though not his novels. And so thoroughgoing an Englishman cannot, of course, consciously adopt any ideology; he sympathises with the underdog, but avoids generalisations about how to help him; he can have private reservations about religion but does not do more than hint at them. So non-committal is he that – although evidently disapproving of the Empire and sympathising with the nascent wish for self-determination – he can end a piece in these words:

‘A new spirit has entered India. Would that I could conclude with a eulogy of it! But that must be left [he adds sardonically] to writers who can see into the future and who know in what human happiness consists’.

He warms to strong opinions, in fact, only in writing about writers. The section on books is the best, although the fact that several of the chosen subjects now languish in obscurity – and were clearly never considered among the great – only seems to confirm his marked taste for the eccentric and trivial. How very English.

[Sophie · Rating 4 out of 5]

While I didn’t enjoy this collection of essays as much as “Two cheers for democracy “, there was some good stuff in here. I very much appreciate Forster’s voice, he clearly is educated but he shares his knowledge rather than flouts it.

[Flungoutofspace (Chris) · Rating 3 out of 5]

Forster is a great and entertaining writer, but a lot of the pieces have at max historical interest.

[Katherine · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Failure or sucess seem to have been allotted to men by their stars. But they retain the power of wriggling, of fighting with their star or against it, and in th ewhole universe the only really interesting movement is this wriggle. O Life, thou art Piquet, in fact. A grim relaxation. Still, she might have been Golf" (57).
"'You may be right, but I must gain my own disillusionment, not adopt yours; you know much, I nothing, yet I cannot learn from you'" (244).

[Madeline · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had to return this to the library before I could finish it, and have never been moved to pick it up again, although there are some good essays here and generally I really like Forster's nonfiction. But - generally, I am the sort of reader who will just pay the late fees, and in this case I didn't think it worth it, so.

[Rebekah · Rating 1 out of 5]

Forster is my 2nd favorite author of all time, and I adore his fiction, but I could not stand this compilation. There were 2 or 3 pieces that caught my eye, but I skipped most of the selections. Ugh!