On Saturday, in my favourite bookshop, I faltered over Frank Kermode’s Concerning E. M. Forster and left the shop with other selections. Edmund White’s absorbing review suggests I should revisit my decision. An excerpt of the review:

We learn that Forster would never have finished “A Passage to India” had it not been for Leonard Woolf’s prodding. Leonard was a brilliant editor, not only of his wife’s work but of the novels written by friends and the authors he and Virginia published. We read that Forster was, especially in his youth, a devoted Wagner ian and that the concept of leitmotifs influenced his ideas about literary rhythm, though Forster felt his own rhythms were less obtrusive than Wagner’s recurring themes. We discover that Forster rejected Henry James in part because he did not want to conform to James’s practice of writing an entire novel from a single point of view and in part because Forster liked to express his own opinions about life and the world in asides to the reader — an old-fashioned practice that James avoided. Using as an example one of Forster’s novels, Kermode writes, “It may be allowed that in ‘Howards End’ the characters are represented as free individuals, with minds of their own, but the book contains a strikingly large amount of authorial reflection, wise sayings about love, class and culture, panic and emptiness, prose and passion, connecting and not connecting, straightforward announcements of the Forsterian way of looking at the human condition.”

[Via Chekhov’s Mistress]