Surrey in A Room with a View: A Candidate for Scholarly Mediation

Abstract

Like anyone else, E.M. Forster had his own sociocultural formation. More unusually, he wrote fiction which, both during his own lifetime and more recently, has interested readers from backgrounds widely different from his, and which has been found significant for its handling of universal themes. Not only that, but he is taken seriously even by critics who regard the notion of universal themes as mere ideological obfuscation. What makes his ability to engage such a broad range of commentators truly remarkable is that, even when, as in A Passage to India, his fictional setting is at its most exotic and his aspirations at their most universalist, so much of his central inspiration and material clearly derives from his own particular “world”—from the precise historical experience, concerns, values, places, and types of people to which he has become accustomed in his own life.