Next up Mrs Gaskell. Cranford was our re-read book for years and years but now we would reach for Wives and Daughters or North and South and actually have promised ourselves, since the election, a reread of Mary Barton.
Archives: Persephone Post
We are careful in the shop not to have a favourite book or indeed a favourite author, which is why for us to say last week that Forster reigned supreme was quite radical. One or two people were surprised that our favourite wasn’t a woman, but that is why in the strapline we say ‘(mostly) women writers’ (if we were choosing only men, then R C Sherriff would probably come next). This week on the Post: our five favourite women writers who come scampering at Forster’s heels. First, obviously, George Eliot and Middlemarch. So much has been written about this great, great novelist and her extraordinary novel that there is no need to give any links. Suffice to say that if you have no time to read Middlemarch then there are several good audiobook versions; and the television adaptation a few years ago (with the blessed Rufus Sewell) was superb.
This photograph makes one a little sad and yet it shouldn’t. Forster was devoted to his mother, even if often exasperated by her, and they mostly lived happily together for sixty-five years. Lily’s influence hovers in the background of everything he wrote and in another, later era she would have been a much sparkier, more interesting figure than she was allowed to be by post-Victorians. Morgan Forster died on June 7th 1970. Fifty years later glasses will be raised to him all over the world.
Dora Carrington painted Morgan Forster in 1920. The painting is now at the National Portrait Gallery.
Forster’s connection with India was lifelong and was one of the most fascinating things about him – his openness to other cultures was profound. He went to Dewas to be a tutor (he also had been a tutor to Elizabeth von Arnim’s children at Nassenheide, so had experience of this). Here he is on the left. This picture comes from someone’s excellent blog here.
Rooksnest near Stevenage is where it all began and where Morgan Forster lived for ten years until he went away to school when he was 14. The image of the beloved childhood home runs throughout Howards End. This is Forster as a child outside the house (which is still there and has in fact just been sold, maybe the new owner will allow a Persephone tour, we shall write and ask).
We make no secret of the fact that (tribute to Lucy Ellmann!) EM Forster is our lodestone, our first-above-everyone; despite a) his being a man b) our obsession with twentieth-century women writers. Not only is Forster the greatest novelist of the twentieth century (in our view, and obviously the majority wouldn’t agree), he was also a great thinker and commentator (in print and on the radio), so revered that over the last four years we have very often thought, if Forster was alive this tragedy wouldn’t be happening. Well, it has now happened, and despite the superb words of two of our greatest living novelists, John le Carré here and Ian McEwan here, they are not Forster. (Nor are the people who write to the Guardian, though goodness they come close – cf. today.) So this week on the Post, a few weeks before the fiftieth anniversary of Forster’s death (which means there will be a lot about him between now and April) we celebrate his brilliance as a novelist and his genius as a thinker and commentator.
And finally the classic Thonet chair plus two more elaborate ones. All the bentwood chairs in the shop have black ribbons tied on them as we mourn the tragic, self-destructive, absurd and petty act of national self-harm that is being perpetrated today. And rude. Have you ever seen anything as reprehensible as Nigel Farage and Ann Widdecombe waving their flags? And the dignity and kindness with which the European MPs sang ‘Auld Lang Syne’ made us cry for the first time since, well, the ending of Little Women. Although there will be a lot of tears and hugs in the office today. (We shall get Disgusted Tunbridge Wells emails about this remark but hey ho…)
And another focal point of a room.
Another iconic piece, which would be the focal point of any bedroom.