A Standard Edition of E. M. Forster's Works and of a Major Forster Novel

134 REVIEWS 1. A Standard Edition of E. M. Forster's Works and of a Major Forster Novel. Oliver Stallybrass (ed). The Abinger Edition of E. M. Forster (Lond: Edward Arnold): Vol. 11, Two Cheers for Democracy (1972). £4.?5; Vol. 8, The. Life to. Come and Other Stories (1972). £2.50; Vol. 13, Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson and Related Writings (1973). £4.75; Vol. 4. Howards End (1973). £4.75; Vol. 4A, The. Manuscripts of Howards End (1973). £15· The Abinger Edition of E. M. Forster. edited by Oliver Stallybrass , has already become an impressive enterprise and is beginning to take its place as one of the few standard editions yet available for a major author in the period 1880-1920. It is unfortunate that copyright difficulties prevent the printing of most of the volumes in America (The Life to Come has appeared, however, as The Life to Come and Other Short Stories, under the Norton imprint, with its British Introduction). These are books which the Forster scholar and the Bloomsbury enthusiast will find indispensable. Two Cheers for Democracy is in this edition notable for its "Editor 's Introduction" which describes how Forster collected his articles for the book, for the careful collation of the text, and for its "Annotated Index" which provides at once illuminating notes for the volume and a kind of concordance to its contents. The Life to Come and Other Stories brings together short stories mostly written after 1922, mostly hitherto unpublished, and mostly on homosexual themes. These stories do not add much to Forster's stature but do help define and fill out the contours of his imaginative universe. Some of them are excellent, "The Other Boat," "The Life to Come," "Dr. Woolacott," and "The Obelisk" (I am in a minority in liking the last). Again, the "Introduction" provides indispensable materials in the form of unpublished letters and journals for the genesis and the writing of the stories. Again, Stallybrass carefully establishes his text. It was difficult to do since he had to work with manuscripts that were often heavily corrected and not always consistently so; but he has solved the textual problems, I think, as well as anyone could have. Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson and Related Writings was published in 1973, concurrently with The Autobiography of G_, Lowes Dickinson, edited by Dennis Proctor (Duckworth).The two books are, of course, closely related, Forster having drawn on the autobiography in its unpublished state for much of the earlier part of his biography . Auden's introduction to the Abinger volume underlines the importance of Dickinson both as biography and as Forster's spiritual autobiography, since it enables us to see Forster's Cambridge more clearly than in any other work except perhaps in The Longest Journey. The textual problems were not great for this book since 135 no manuscript or typescript exists; but Stallybrass has corrected and emended the text in a number of places, some of them of substantive importance. He has helpfully rounded out his book by including most of Forster's occasional writings on Dickinson, omitting only those which repeat too closely the ones he has selected . Since I have noticed in other journals all three of the volumes so far described, I shall concentrate in this review upon Volumes 4 and 4A, Howards End and The Manuscripts of Howards End. Suffice to say that all the volumes reveal editorial expertise of a high order and a real genius for selecting, in the Introductions, from unpublished documents to provide the most illuminating ambiance for the given work. In the "Editor's Introduction" to Howards End Stallybrass reveals that Förster had been working on a novel in 1908 that dramatized "the spiritual cleavage" between the Schlegel sisters and the Wilcoxes. Stallybrass also quotes from published and unpublished sources to indicate how Howards End reflects Forster's own experiences in Shropshire, London, Manchester, and Germany. Even more important perhaps is the reprinting, as an appendix, of "Rooksnest ," Forster's earliest known composition dating from 1894. The novel thus reaches back into Forster's experiences as a boy, from the years 1884 to 1894 when he lived at Rooksnest, the prototype for Howards End house. Stallybrass...