Forster’s first collection of short stories was published in 1911 and consists of stories written at various times during the previous decade. The stories frequently incorporate supernatural and fantasy elements that attack the perennial Forsterian target of the stifled, repressed English middle-class. ‘The Story of a Panic’, for example, makes literal use of the derivation of the word ‘panic’ from the name of the rural spirit ‘Pan’. In the tale, a young boy appears to go mad on a holiday in Italy after possibly becoming possessed by Pan. While this almost Gothic use of the Italian countryside evokes themes dealt with more fully in Where Angels Fear to Tread and A Room with a View, the elements of the boy’s relationship with the young fisherman Gennaro also draws upon the homoerotic subtext of Forster’s first novel to articulate its theme of a more sexually and socially liberated Italy in contrast to the repressed atmosphere of suburban England.
Suburban repression is also the theme of ‘The Celestial Omnibus’, another fantasy in which a young boy discovers a spectral horse-drawn bus, driven by the Renaissance writer Sir Thomas Browne. The vehicle leaves town every evening for a ‘Heaven’ peopled by characters from literature. When the boy tells his tutor of his discovery, however, the older man is at first sceptical, then terrified – a metaphor for his inability to confront on a personal, empathic level the texts he has pored over in his academic studies.
‘Other Kingdom’ is a strange tale in which a young woman tries to persuade her husband not to fence off a copse on their grounds, in which she loves to wander. The ‘other kingdom’ of the title refers not only to the copse itself but also to the transcendent natural beauty that the young woman’s fiancé cannot comprehend. Forster references the story (and its supernatural conclusion) in The Longest Journey, where it is described as one of the literary productions of the novel’s protagonist, Rickie.
The other three stories (‘The Road from Colonus’, ‘The Curate’s Friend’ and ‘The Other Side of the Hedge’) continue the theme of supernatural forces startling English protagonists out of their repressed modes of life and thought.