Aspects of the Novel by E. M. Forster

Wuthering Heights (1847), by Charlotte Brontë, is an early Gothic novel by one of the four writers Forster deems truly prophetic. It concerns themes of inheritance and legitimacy among the upper classes of the English countryside and includes elements of the supernatural.

Moby Dick (1851), by Herman Melville, is considered one of the greatest novels ever written. It narrates one man’s obsession with the pursuit of Moby Dick, a great white whale that he is determined to kill. Forster deems this one of the truly prophetic novels ever written.

The novel The Brothers Karamazov (1879–1880) is a masterpiece by the Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky, whom Forster deemed one of four truly prophetic novelists. It concerns a man accused of the murder of his own father.

Howard’s End (1910), a novel by Forster and his first major literary success, is concerned with divisions among upper and lower classes in Edwardian England, as expressed by the encounter between members of two different families.

The novel Women in Love (1920) is one of the major works by D. H. Lawrence, whom Forster considered the only truly prophetic writer alive at the time of his lecture series in 1927. It concerns the romantic relationship of two sisters, both modern, independent, free-spirited women, in the post-World War I era of England. It is a continuation of the earlier novel The Rainbow, which chronicles three generations of a family from the 1960s up to the years preceding World War I.

The novel A Passage to India (1924) is Forster’s masterpiece, in which a young girl experiences the clash of cultures between the British and Indians in colonial India.

Abinger Harvest (1936) is a collection of about fifty essays by Forster that originally appeared between 1919 and 1935. As in the later collection