The Longest Journey

The Longest Journey was published in 1907 and is the second of E. M. Forster's six novels. It was his own favourite among them, though it is the least read. Rickie Elliot, its hero, is a Cambridge undergraduate with a lame foot, no mother, a fondness for poetry and no particular reason to expect much of the world.

Forster's Cambridge is a place of long arguments conducted at odd hours, and the friendship that shapes Rickie's life there is with Stewart Ansell, a philosopher who dislikes Rickie's relatives on principle and says so. The tone changes sharply once Rickie is engaged to Agnes Pembroke and settled, by a legacy from his aunt, into an ordinary English marriage in which he is expected to be sensible. Rickie's difficulty is that he is generous, suggestible and almost entirely without the instinct for self-preservation his friends have, and Forster makes the reader watch him being managed by people who love him imperfectly.

The novel then does something abrupt, moving out of social comedy into a story about a half-brother, a concealed parentage and the English countryside, and it does not entirely reconcile the two halves. That awkward join is exactly what divides its readers, and it is the reason the book sits so oddly between the satire of Forster's earlier work and the moral seriousness of Howards End.