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The mystery of why acclaimed author E.M. Forster stopped writing novels after 1924 until his death 46 years later has been solved.

Forster was the author of classics such as A Room with a View and Howards End examining class differences in early twentieth-century English society.

A Passage to India, which appeared in 1924, was the last of his novels to be published during his lifetime. Forster died in 1970 and in that time never wrote another novel.

Now it has been suggested that he lost all creative drive after he lost his virginity in his thirties to a wounded soldier on a beach in Egypt, and felt that he could no longer write convincingly about the heterosexual world on which his fame and success rested.

Wendy Moffat, who has written a new biography of Forster, has had access to the author's previously unseen papers, including a sex diary.

She told the Sunday Times: 'He never had sex until he was 38, although he never had any doubts - even from a very young age - that he was gay.'

A conscientious objector, Forster worked for the Red Cross in Egypt during the First World War where he had his encounter with a soldier. In the diary he wrote about losing “R” – for “respectability”.

Another diary entry reads: “'I should have been a more famous writer if I had written or rather published more, but sex prevented the latter.”

Forster remained a bachelor all his life but had several gay affairs, including two with police officers, at a time when gay sex was illegal.

He was also attracted to working-class men. “I want to love a strong young man of the lower classes and be loved by him and even hurt by him,” he wrote.

In the 1910s Forster wrote Maurice, a novel about a young gay man looking for love in a heterosexual world. It was only published after his death, as he felt that its publication would out him.

Towards the end of his life he wrote in his diary:

“Now I am 85 how annoyed I am with society for wasting my time by making homosexuality criminal. The subterfuges and the self-consciousnesses that might have been avoided.”

 

E. M. Forster: A New Life by Wendy Moffat is published by Bloomsbury Books