The Longest Journey
Rickie Elliot arrives at Cambridge believing that poetry and friendship are the point of life, and Forster spends the rest of the novel testing that belief against marriage, schoolmastering and a colonial inheritance. It is the least read of Forster's novels and the one that most openly discusses his themes.
The structure is odd: a Cambridge idyll, a disastrous marriage, a journey to Wiltshire, and a final turn that feels both arbitrary and inevitable. Forster had not yet learned the lightness of A Room with a View. What he had already learned is how to make a decent person's compromises interesting.
Public-domain status
First published in 1907. In the United States, works published before 1930 are in the public domain. In the European Union the general term is the life of the author plus 70 years; E. M. Forster died in 1970, so the work enters the public domain there in 2041. Check the law where you live before reusing a modern edition, introduction or translation.
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Keep reading
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- Oliver Twist — Charles Dickens, 1838
- New Grub Street — George Gissing, 1891
- The Way We Live Now — Anthony Trollope, 1875
- Cambridge — the city behind the books
- Reading lists — 19 ways through the collection
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