‘How can I tell what I think till I see what I say?’ (AN 99). This quotation takes us to the heart of Forster's work: it entails uncertainty and the unpredictable, it foregrounds a strangeness in the very act of speech and writing. Spontaneous yet calculating, its alliterative half-rhyming of ‘tell’ and ‘till’ and the sibilance of ‘see’ and ‘say’ suggest at once a blurring of the senses (the time till telling, seeing speech) and an uneasy lucidity. It is a rhetorical question, true in ways that are self-evident but disturbing, unanswerable. It suggests that what people think is only possible thanks to what is concealed from them. It implies that language, or ‘what I say’, is not simply a medium or tool; rather, language interferes, alters, invents. What we think is an unforeseeable effect of what we find ourselves saying. According to the model implicit in this question, thinking about Forster's work, reading and writing about it, has to be risky and potentially unsettling, even to the point of changing what we think we think and who or what we think we are.

E. M. Forster was the author of six novels and numerous short stories, as well as two travel books – Alexandria: A History and a Guide (1922) and The Hill of Devi (1953) – and two biographies (one of his friend Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, in 1934, another of his aunt Marianne Thornton, in 1956). He alsowrote a good deal of critical material, in particular Aspects of the Novel (1927) and the many pieces collected in Abinger Harvest (1936) and Two Cheers for Democracy (1951). His most important critical work, Aspects of the Novel, was based on a series of lectures given at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1926–7. Aspects of the Novel is a very powerful book whose originality tends to be overlooked at the present time, mainly because Forster's concerns and critical vocabulary are felt to be old-fashioned, theoretically unsophisticated, and at odds with the professionalism of current academic writing and teaching.