IN my research, I have relied first and foremost on E. M. Forster’s own writings, both fiction and non-fiction, including his diaries (Pickering and Chatto, 2011) and letters (edited by Mary Lago and P.N. Furbank; the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Volume One 1983 and Volume Two 1985). For permission to quote from his published work, I am grateful to The Society of Authors as the Literary Representative of the Forster Estate. For permission to quote his unpublished writing, I am grateful to The Provost and Scholars of King’s College, Cambridge, and The Society of Authors.
I wish to state that I have seeded quotes from A Passage to India at certain unrelated points in my novel, in order to suggest the wide range of sources from which Forster may have drawn his material. I should also point out that where I have used actual dialogue recorded by Forster (and others) in letters or diaries, I have sometimes altered the words a little, on the assumption that nobody recalls conversations, even their own, with complete certainty. On the other hand, I have tried to be as accurate as possible in evoking the India of Forster’s time, down to modes of address and the use of place names. For the same reason I haven’t modernised spellings, with the exception of a couple of words.
I am also indebted to four biographies of Forster. It would be hard to surpass P. N. Furbank’s superb two-volume E. M. Forster: A Life (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977, 1978). Mr Furbank was also kind enough to meet with me to share some of his personal impressions and reminiscences of Forster. I have used information, too, from Morgan by Nicola Beauman (Hodder & Stoughton, 1993), A Great Unrecorded History by Wendy Moffat (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010) and E. M. Forster by Francis King (Thames & Hudson, 1978). Helpful, too, was the Paris Review interview with Forster conducted by P. N. Furbank and F. J. H. Haskell in 1952, which appears in the First Series of Writers at Work (Viking Press, 1958).
In addition, I have been helped by Miriam Allott’s introduction to the Abinger edition of Forster’s Alexandria and Pharos and Pharillon (edited by Miriam Allott; André Deutsch, 2004); Elizabeth Heine’s introduction to the Abinger edition of The Hill of Devi and other Indian writings (edited by Elizabeth Heine; Edward Arnold, 1983); and Philip Gardiner’s notes to The Journals and Diaries of E. M. Forster (edited by Philip Gardiner; Pickering and Chatto, 2011).
Biographies of other figures connected to Forster that I have drawn on are, in no particular order: Cavafy by Robert Liddell (Duckworth, 1974); Edward Carpenter by Sheila Rowbotham (Verso, 2008); Lytton Strachey by Michael Holroyd (Chatto & Windus, 1994); The Priest of Love by Harry T. Moore (William Heinemann, 1974); Leonard Woolf by Victoria Glendinning (Simon and Schuster, 2006); and Virginia Woolf by Hermione Lee (Chatto & Windus, 1996). I have adapted excerpts from The Diary of Virginia Woolf: Volume II 1920-1924, (edited by Ann Olivier Bell; diary copyright 1978 by Quentin Bell and Angelica Garnett; the Hogarth Press, 1978; reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Limited in the United Kingdom and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in the USA). For permission to quote Virginia Woolf I am grateful again to The Society of Authors as the Literary Representative of her Estate.
For historical background on India at that time I have used Raj: the Making and Unmaking of British India by Lawrence James (Little, Brown, 1997); Women of the Raj by Margaret MacMillan (Thames and Hudson, 1996); and Raj, A Scrapbook of British India by Charles Allen (Book Club Associates, 1977). Invaluable for my Egyptian section was Michael Haag’s wonderful Alexandria, City of Memory (Yale University Press, 2004).
Other books that helped me were The Forster–Cavafy Letters edited by Peter Jeffreys (The American University in Cairo Press, 2009); Aspects of E. M. Forster edited by Oliver Stallybrass (Edward Arnold, 1969); Concerning E. M. Forster by Frank Kermode (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2009); E. M. Forster, interviews and recollections edited by J. H. Stape (St Martin’s Press, 1993); E. M. Forster’s India by G. K. Das (Macmillan Press, 1977); and Islam by Alfred Guillaume (Penguin, 1954). Ronald Hyam’s Empire and Sexuality: the British Experience (Manchester University Press, 1990) provided the quote from Kenneth Searight’s poem which appears on this page. The line from Cavafy’s “The God Abandons Antony” on this page is from the first English translation by G. A. Valassopoulo, which appeared in Pharos and Pharillon in 1923.
I am very grateful to the School of English at the University of St Andrews and the Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Trust for a generous residency in 2012.
My thanks for their insights to Tony Peake, Alison Lowry and Margaret Stead. In addition, I am grateful to Fourie Botha, Ellen Selig man, Nigel Maister, Peter Cartwright, Neel Mukherjee, Tamsin Shelton, David Davidar and Aienla Ozukum for their critical perceptions; to Anat Yakuel, for a space to work in; and for his help on my visit to the Barabar Caves, to Manish Shavoren.