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Originally Posted by toomanybooks
I always believed that he stopped writing because he could not publish books that reflected his life as a gay man and was tired of writing exclusively about heterosexual relationships.
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I like to add this to the discussion.
(ibidem)
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Once Forster’s life-long need to veil his sexuality had become a matter of public record, it was too tempting for some commentators to resist locating the source of his alleged narrowness and tepidity as a novelist, and his running out of steam in that role, in his matriarchal upbringing. Many other critics, however, have set out to scotch the kind of simplistic reading of Forster’s work that posits a straightforward and inevitable link between his aborted career as a novelist and his covert inner being.
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Forster’s sexuality plainly helped determine the shape of his career, and perhaps another reason he gave up writing novels is that he felt not just that his realist ‘camera’ had already taken more than enough images of a (heterosexual) world from which he felt excluded, but also that it had tended to take the same or a similar photograph time and again. It is noticeable, for instance, that his novels tend not only to recycle characters – Harriet Herriton and Charlotte Bartlett, for example, or Cecil Vyse and Tibby Schlegel, or the first Mrs Wilcox and Mrs Moore – but that characters from one novel have a knack of popping up in another, reinforcing the criticism that is sometimes levelled at Forster that his fictional world is overly restricted. Is the ‘Miss Herriton’ mentioned in the ‘Sawston’ section of The Longest Journey (Chapter 16), for example, none other than Miss Harriet Herriton of Sawston (Where Angels Fear to Tread)? Is the ‘Miss Quested’ who plays the piano at the Schlegels’ lunch party in Chapter 9 of Howards End the same person as A Passage to India’s Hampstead-based Adela Quested? And is the ‘wretched, weedy’ Mr Vyse, whom Tibby and Margaret Schlegel discuss in Chapter 13 of Howards End, the non-tennis playing and fervently aesthetic Cecil Vyse of A Room with a View?
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