Explore "The Novels of E. M. Forster" by Virginia Woolf on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
There are many reasons which should prevent one from criticizing the work of contemporaries. Besides the obvious uneasiness--the fear of hurting feelings--there is too the difficulty of being just. Coming out one by one, their books seem like parts of a design which is slowly uncovered.
Our appreciation may be intense, but our curiosity is even greater. Does the new fragment add anything to what went before? Does it carry out our theory of the author's talent, or must we alter our forecast? Such questions ruffle what should be the smooth surface of our criticism and make it full of argument and interrogation. With a novelist like Mr. Forster this is specially true, for he is in any case an author about whom there is considerable disagreement. There is something baffling and evasive in the very nature of his gifts. So, remembering that we are at best only building up a theory which may be knocked down in a year or two by Mr. Forster himself, let us take Mr. Forster's novels in the order in which they were written, and tentatively and cautiously try to make them yield us an answer.