A Passage to India
Read by Kirsten Wever
Running Time:13:43:05
E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924) is widely acclaimed as one of the hundred best literary works of 20th century. Time magazine rates it among the top 100 English-language novels of all time.
A Passage to India is set at the moment when the lasting supremacy of the British Raj could no longer be taken for granted. Imperial power had been effectively supported by old and deep-seated religious and cultural conflicts between India’s Hindu and Muslim populations, which divided and sapped the local powers ultimately needed to overthrow imperial rule in 1947. Forster illustrates how this rift begins to be overshadowed by the increasing resistance of all Indians to the extreme racism, oppression and socio-political mismanagement of British rule.
The work is perhaps best known for his brilliant development of the relationships between his characters, which are fraught by a wide range of precarious cultural, social, political and economic dualisms: e.g., Occident / Orient; imperialist / colonial; men / women. He carries the idea expressed in his famous words “only connect” (from Howards End) to its limits, examining the difficulties – often the inherent impossibility – of “connection” across racial, sexual, religious and social divides.
A Room with a View
Read by Elizabeth Klett
Running Time:7:09:37
The 1908 novel A Room With a View is the story of Lucy Honeychurch, a young English girl traveling to Italy for the first time. While staying in Florence, Lucy meets the unconventional George Emerson, with whom she shares a single passionate kiss, much to the horror of her chaperone, her spinsterish cousin Charlotte. Back in England, Lucy finds she must choose between George and her rather stuffy fiance Cecil Vyse. Forster's wonderfully comic romance satirizes turn-of-the-century English culture (as did his other major novel of the period, Howards End).
A Room with a View
(Dramatic Reading)
Running Time:7:02:32
A Room with a View is a 1908 novel by English writer E. M. Forster, about a young woman in the repressed culture of Edwardian era England. Set in Italy and England, the story is both a romance and a critique of English society at the beginning of the 20th century.
Cast:
Lucy Honeychurch/Narrator: Arielle Lipshaw
Charlotte Bartlett: Elizabeth Klett
Mr. Emerson: asterix
George Emerson: nomorejeffs
Mr. Beebe: Bob Neufeld
Miss Eleanor Lavish: Patti Cunningham
Miss Theresa Alan: ElleyKat
Miss Catharine Alan: Maryanka
Italian Lady/Persephone/Maid: Libby Gohn
Mr. Eager/Powell: Ric F
Vicar/Sir Harry Otway/Phaethon/Freddy Honeychurch: tovarisch
Mrs. Honeychurch: CaprishaPage
Cecil Vyse: Brett W. Downey
Mrs. Vyse: Etel Buss
Minnie Beebe: Charlotte Duckett
Aspects of the Novel
Read by Ciufi Galeazzi
Running Time:05:02:33
This s a series of lectures given at Trinity College by the acclaimed author E.M. Forster (A Passage to India, Howard's End, A Room With a View) . In them, he discusses "both the different ways we can look at a novel and the different ways a novelist can look at his work." The aspects of the novel Forster discusses are the story, people, plot,, fantasy, prophecy and rhythm. While this is a work of academic analysis and not what one expects in a Forster work, the author's wit and voice help make the book very accessible and engaging.
Howard's End
Read by Elizabeth Klett
Running Time:12:11:44
The book is about three families in England at the beginning of the twentieth century. The three families represent different gradations of the Edwardian middle class: the Wilcoxes, who are rich capitalists with a fortune made in the Colonies; the half-German Schlegel siblings (Margaret, Tibby, and Helen), who represent the intellectual bourgeoisie and have a lot in common with the real-life Bloomsbury Group; and the Basts, a couple who are struggling members of the lower-middle class. The Schlegel sisters try to help the poor Basts and try to make the Wilcoxes less prejudiced. The motto of the book is "Only connect..
The Celestial Omnibus, and Other Stories
Read by Kirsten Wever
Running Time:04:27:56
With twenty Nobel Prize nominations to his credit, E. M. Forster may reasonably be considered one of the best writers of the 20th century – perhaps of all time. He is best known for his 1924 novel A Passage to India. But almost all his writings met with rapid critical, popular and international success.
Forster’s world-view was exceptionally broad – even multi-cultural – as expressed in the humanism characterizing all his works, in the wide-ranging social criticism of Howard’s End, and in the spiritual and mystical themes for which A Passage to India is famous, and which also underlie the stories collected in The Celestial Omnibus.
The Story of a Panic
The Other Side of the Hedge
The Celestial Omnibus
Other Kingdom
The Curate's Friend
The Road from Colonus
The Longest Journey
Read by Julie Pandya and Nathalie J.
Running Time:10:27:15
Frederick Elliot is a student at early 20th century Cambridge, a university that seems like paradise to him, amongst bright if cynical companions, when he receives a visit from two friends, an engaged young woman, Agnes Pembroke, and her older brother, Herbert. The Pembrokes are Rickie’s only friends from home. An orphan who grew up living with cousins, he was sent to a public (boarding) school where he was shunned and bullied because of his lame foot, an inherited weakness, and frail body. Agnes, as it happens, is engaged to Gerald, now in the army, who was one of the sturdy youths who bullied Rickie at school. Rickie is not brilliant at argument, but he is intensely responsive to poetry and art, and is accepted within a circle of philosophical and intellectual fellow-students led by a brilliant but especially cynical aspiring philosopher, Stuart Ansell, who refuses, when he is introduced to her, even to acknowledge that Agnes exists.
The Machine Stops
Read by Elizabeth Klett
Running Time:1:20:38
"The Machine Stops" is a science fiction short story by E. M. Forster. After initial publication in The Oxford and Cambridge Review (November 1909), the story was republished in Forster's The Eternal Moment and Other Stories in 1928. After being voted one of the best novellas up to 1965, it was included that same year in the populist anthology Modern Short Stories. The story describes a world in which most of the human population has lost the ability to live on the surface of the Earth. Each individual now lives in isolation below ground in a standard 'cell', with all bodily and spiritual needs met by the omnipotent, global Machine.
Where Angels Fear to Tread
Read by Julie Pandya
Running Time:4:43:32
On a journey to Tuscany with her young friend and traveling companion Caroline Abbott, widowed Lilia Herriton falls in love with both Italy and a handsome Italian much younger than herself and decides to stay. Furious, her dead husband's family send Lilia's brother-in-law to Italy to prevent a misalliance, but he arrives too late. Lilia marries the Italian and in due course becomes pregnant again. When she dies giving birth to her child, the Herritons consider it both their right and their duty to travel to Monteriano to obtain custody of the infant so that he can be raised as an Englishman.