| 1879 | Edward Morgan Forster is born on January 1 in London to Edward Morgan Llewellyn Forster and Alice Clara (“Lily”) Whichelo. |
| 1880 | Edward senior, an architect, dies of tuberculosis. After his father’s death, Edward is raised by women, who dote on him. |
| 1883 | Edward and his mother settle in the countryside of Hertfordshire , at Rooksnest, which later will be the inspiration for the house in Howards End. |
| 1887 | Marianne “Monie” Thornton, Edward’s beloved paternal great-aunt, dies, leaving him an inheritance of £8,000. Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet, the first Sherlock Holmes story, is published. |
| 1890 | Oscar Wilde publishes The Picture of Dorian Gray. |
| 1891 | Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles appears. |
| 1893 | The family moves to Tonbridge, Kent, where Edward enters prep school. He is mercilessly teased by the athletic set for his delicate, sensitive disposition. |
| 1897 | Forster enters King’s College, Cambridge. His studies in classics and history earn him honors, and he makes important intellectual connections with his dons and fellow students . Widely recognized as a brilliant thinker, he is inducted into the Apostles, Cambridge’s most famous intellectual society. The Apostles introduce him to his future Bloomsbury companions Lytton Strachey and John Maynard Keynes. Bram Stoker’s Dracula is published. |
| 1901 | Forster travels throughout Italy and Greece. |
| 1902 | He begins teaching at the Working Men’s College in London , a position he will hold for twenty years. |
| 1903 | Forster publishes a short story, “Albergo Empedocle.” He |
| begins writing for The Independent Review, founded this year. |
| 1905 | Where Angels Fear to Tread is published to positive reviews, and marks the beginning of a highly productive literary period for Forster. |
| 1906 | Forster becomes the tutor of an Indian student named Syed Ross Masood, falling madly in love and experiencing intense frustration when his feelings are unrequited. |
| 1907 | The Longest Journey is published. |
| 1908 | A Room with a View is published. |
| 1910 | While Forster’s literary reputation has been slowly increasing , the publication of Howards End confirms his status as one of England’s most respected young novelists. The same year, he becomes more active in the Bloomsbury group, which includes Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, John Maynard Keynes, Lytton Strachey, and Roger Fry. The latter paints a well-known portrait of Forster. |
| 1912 | Inspired by his love for Masood, Forster journeys to India for the first time, a trip that inspires his later novel A Passage to India. |
| 1913 | Forster writes Maurice, a story of homosexual love; it will not be published until a year after Forster’s death. |
| 1914—1919 | With the outbreak of World War I, Forster first takes a job as cataloguer for the National Gallery. Soon after, however, he decides to work for the Red Cross in Alexandria, Egypt. His experience of the war results in a more pessimistic view of the world. He has his first love affair, with a young Egyptian bus conductor, and writes Alexandria: A History and a Guide. James Joyce’s Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, D. H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow, and Gerard Manley Hopkins’s Poems are published during this period. |
| 1920 | Forster contributes numerous articles to several prominent journals, thus embarking on a lifelong career as a journalist. |
| 1921 | He once again travels to India and works as private secretary to a maharaja. |
| 1922 | T. S. Eliot’s The Wasteland and Joyce’s Ulysses are published. |
| 1924 | A Passage to India is published. Generally considered Forster’s masterpiece, the work is to be his final novel. |
| 1930 | Forster meets Bob Buckingham, a London policeman, who becomes his companion and dearest friend throughout the remainder of his life. |
| 1934 | Elected president of the National Council of Civil Liberties, Forster inspires many politically active young writers, such as W. H. Auden (1907—1973) and Christopher Isherwood (1904—1986). |
| 1939 | World War II begins. |
| 1941 | Virginia Woolf drowns herself. |
| 1943 | Lionel Trilling’s seminal work on Forster, E. M. Forster: A Study, is published. |
| 1945 | Forster’s mother dies, and he makes his final trip to India. George Orwell’s Animal Farm appears. |
| 1948 | T. S. Eliot receives the Nobel Prize for Literature. |
| 1950 | Bertrand Russell receives the Nobel Prize for Literature. |
| 1951 | Forster publishes Two Cheers for Democracy and coauthors, with Eric Crozier, the libretto for Benjamin Britten’s opera Billy Budd, based on Herman Melville’s novel. |
| 1953 | Queen Elizabeth II awards Forster membership in the Order of Companions of Honour. Four years earlier he had declined a knighthood. |
| 1960 | An opponent of censorship throughout his life, Forster speaks at the obscenity trial concerning D. H. Lawrence’s 1928 novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover. |
| 1970 | E. M. Forster dies in Coventry on June 7. |
| 1972 | Forster’s unpublished stories and essays are published in Albergo Empedocle and Other Writings. |