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WHEN writing it I thought it a failure,’ wrote E. M. Forster to fellow author Christopher Isherwood in 1937. His subject was the novel that, in his lifetime and since, has been acclaimed as his masterpiece: A Passage to India.
As Forster himself suspected, the novel—on which he worked intermittently for 11 years and which was published a century ago, on June 4, 1924—proved his last. ‘My patience with ordinary people has given out,’ he told Siegfried Sassoon. According to a diary entry he made in 1911, ‘weariness of the only subject that I both can and may treat—the love of