Battle versus work

The great popular success of Forster’s Howards End, published in 1910, meant that he was under pressure to set to work on a new novel, and in the following year he did so, but in a mood of self-doubt. He told himself it was wrong to force oneself to write; that before attempting a new work he always felt he needed to reappraise his own existence; that (as he noted in his diary) he was weary of ‘the only subject that I both can and may treat — the love of men for women and vice-versa’. He was suffering moreover from a superstitious sense that success didn’t suit him and that he might ‘go smash’. Nevertheless an idea came to him. Howards End had turned on the antithesis between death and money; he now envisaged a novel opposing battle to work, and he drafted a number of chapters before his first visit to India, returning to it fitfully later.