Aspects of the Novel

Forster’s lively, informed originality and wit have made this book a classic. Avoiding the chronological approach of what he calls “pseudoscholarship,” he freely examines aspects all English-language novels have in common: story, people, plot, fantasy, prophecy, pattern, and rhythm. Index.

There are all kinds of books out there purporting to explain that odd phenomenon the novel. Sometimes it's hard to know whom they're are for, exactly. Enthusiastic readers? Fellow academics? Would-be writers? Aspects of the Novel, E.M. Forster's 1927 treatise on the "fictitious prose work over 50,000 words" is, it turns out, for anyone with the faintest interest in how fiction is made. Open at random, and find your attention utterly sandbagged.

Forster's book is not really a book at all; rather, it's a collection of lectures delivered at Cambridge University on subjects as parboiled as "People," "The Plot," and "The Story." It has an unpretentious verbal immediacy thanks to its spoken origin and is written in the key of Aplogetic Mumble: "Those who dislike Dickens have an excellent case. He ought to be bad." Such gentle provocations litter these pages. How can you not read on? Forster's critical writing is so ridiculously plainspoken, so happily commonsensical, that we often forget to be intimidated by the rhetorical landscapes he so ably leads us through. As he himself points out in the introductory note, "Since the novel is itself often colloquial it may possibly withhold some of its secrets from the graver and grander streams of criticism, and may reveal them to backwaters and shallows."

And Forster does paddle into some unlikely eddies here. For instance, he seems none too gung ho about love in the novel: "And lastly, love. I am using this celebrated word in its widest and dullest sense. Let me be very dry and brief about sex in the first place." He really means in the first place. Like the narrator of a '50s hygiene film, Forster continues, dry and brief as anything, "Some years after a human being is born, certain changes occur in it..." One feels here the same-sexer having the last laugh, heartily.

Forster's brand of humanism has fallen from fashion in literary studies, yet it endures in fiction itself. Readers still love this author, even if they come to him by way of the multiplex. The durability of his work is, of course, the greatest raison d'être this book could have. It should have been titled How to Write Novels People Will Still Read in a Hundred Years. --Claire Dederer

E. M. Forster was a great author of perfectly constructed English novels. He was responsible for the layered romance of A Room with a View and the pitch-perfect caste battles of Howards End. In short, he knows how to write, so any lecture from him detailing the countless pieces that make a novel work is quite a gift. In Aspects of the Novel, Forster looks at the different parts with a keen intellectual eye, briefly explaining on how they work when done well and then referencing famous works of the past to show them in action. The book succeeds at being very challenging yet accessible, and worth many re-readings. It did not seem so much a guide on how to write better per se, but rather an appreciation/homage for the great writers that Forster admired. It was interesting to see an acclaimed writer drop the disguise, and talk about what he enjoyed as a reader- the usefulness of flat and round characters, the differentiation between plot and story, and the subconscious sense of music when reading a finely constructed work all stuck out for me. Unfortunately for me, I have not read many of the works he cited yet, but the brief synopses and the copied text he cited gives you a good idea of how they operate in relation to that lecture's theme. While not as easily digestible as other lit analysis books (i.e. Reading Like a Writer), it is still regarded as a gold standard and should be read by everyone patient enough to appreciate it.

In the spring of 1927 at Cambridge the Clark Lectures were delivered by Edward Morgan Forster (1879-1970). Forster is well known for his Edwardian age classics "A Room With a View"; "Howard's End"; "Maurice" and a plethora of essays. He would later write "A Passage to India" which is, in my opinion, his finest effort in fiction.
In the Clark lectures we see Forster waxing eloquently about the glories of the English novel. Forster posits the belief that a novel is a work of prose fiction containing over 50,000 words. He believes that the English novel does not delve as deeply into the human soul as do such continental works by masters such as Tolstoy, Dostoevksi, Proust and Hugo.
Each of the lectures deals with one aspect of what is an essential ingredient in the making of a novel. Those topics are:
Story-Without a good story to tell the novel is doomed to failure.
Plot: A plot is what explains the action in the story. What is it that motivates the characters to act as they do. Plots are vital.
People: Fictional characters are either round or flat. Flat characters abound in the vast fictional universe created by Charles Dickens. Round characters are found is such novelists as Jane Austen and George Eliot. These round characters grow, change and adapt themselves to life. Emma by Eliot or Ishamel by Melville are richly drawn as compared with a wooden stick such as David Copperfield by Dickens. A good novel is often a mixture of both round and flat characters. Hemingway could draw rounded male characters but was weak in rounding out his female ones. Virginia Woolf could depict both male and female rounded characters. This discussion of character in fiction was the most valuable chapter to this reviewer.
Forster discusses the use of fantasy and prophetic statements in novels. Many novelists such as Dostoevski and Melville had the ability to dream big dreams and make pronouncements about the human predicament.
Forster's book is a sine qua non in literary criticism even though the lectures were delivered so long ago. The man's obvious love of the novel is palpable. As long as there is paper there will be novels. These basic tips on how to read and relish novels is a valuable resource for the common reader.

Based on a series of lectures, this work is a grand insight into the structure and character of novels and novel writing. It delves into all aspects of the novel including, people, plot, pattern, story-line, etc. I found the lectures on people, pattern and rhythm, and prophecy especially insightful and revealing.
Be forewarned, unless you are a serious writer or literary aficionado, these lectures will most likely be uninspiring. For the average reader, I would rate this book three stars. But if you are a serious writer or literary aficionado, this is a five star book that must possess a prominent and easily accessible place in your library.

The book which started as a series of lectures grew to become one of landmarks in history of literary criticism. Over eighty years after its original publication its value has not diminished. Quite on the contrary, Forster's lucid and rational approach to literature seem to become even more valuable with the publication of almost every book on literary criticism largely regardless of their authors theoretical agendas.
A quarter of a century after the novel was recognised as literature (before Henry James' "The Art of Fiction" only poetry and drama deserved the name) and in the peak period of the modernism (this book was written between the publications of "Ulysses" and "Finnegans Wake") Forster presented his personal view of fiction in a quiet and unassuming but clear and rational way. The resulting book is fairly unrevolutionary for the period of turmoil and change but it has stood the test of time at least as well as the modern experiments.
"Aspects of the Novel" is one of the books which keep the readers repeating to themselves: "But I know this!" Yes, you do. But it was E. M. Forster who said it first.

E.M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel is a series of lectures given in Trinity College, Cambridge, in the spring of 1927. It reminds me of the essays read by Virginia Woolf to the Arts Society at Newnham and the Odtaa at Girton in October, 1928, published as the acclaimed A Room of One's Own. Similar period and both literature critics. Forster divides novels into several aspects: the story, people, the plot, fantasy, prophecy, and pattern and rhythm.
Forster is sometimes insightful but other times tedious and had the marks of the time. For example, he talks about how some characters are flat and some are round. All Dickens characters are flat, and most Austen characters are round. He says,
"The characters in Jane Austen give us a slightly new pleasure each time they come in, as opposed to the merely repetitive pleasure that is caused by a character in Dickens. They combine so well in a conversation, and draw one another out without seeming to do so, and never perform. Unlike Dickens, she was a real artist, she never stooped to caricature, etc. Her characters though smaller than his are more highly organized. They function all round, and even if her plot made greater demands on them than it does, they would still be adequate. All the Jane Austen characters are ready for an extended life, for a life which the scheme of her books seldom requires them to lead, and that is why they lead their actual lives so satisfactorily."