Forster And Virginia Woolf: An Analysis

E. M. Forster and Virginia Woolf were the literary leaders of the Bloomsbury Group, a circle of intellectuals who gathered regularly in London in the first two decades of the twentieth century to discuss art and aesthetics. The circle also included the economist John Maynard Keynes, the painters Vanessa and Clive Bell, and the philosopher and critic Lytton Strachey. From their discussions, Forster often received ideas about art that he later incorporated into his interest and fiction. Forster became well known for his impressive styles, complex characters, and important themes.

Although he is best remembered for his acknowledged masterpieces Howards End (1910) and A Passage to India (1924), Forster’s earlier novels and short stories often point in the direction to which his later fiction turned. These earlier works are usually concerned with how people living in a modern world lack the passion and interests

In Forster’s famous short story “The Road from Colonus” (1903), for example, Mr. Lucas discovers passion at an idyllic spring in Greece. His daughter forces him to return to England. However, he subsequently dies as a miserable and lonely old man. In A Room with a View, on which Forster was working as he finished “The Road from Colonus,” Lucy Honeychurch discovers the passion of Florence, Italy. Lucy is more fortunate in her fate than is Mr. Lucas. She is distraught by a particularly bad hotel room in Florence. Lucy Honeychurch longs for a room with a view of the Arno River, but instead, her room looks into the hotel’s courtyard. Though she eventually gets her room with a view at the hotel, the rest of the novel is concerned with her pursuit for an ideal and imaginative room with a view. Although she initially rejects the passion that Italy represents. Indeed, she is shocked by it. She later comes to accept it as a fundamental part of