E.M. Forster on Sex

“Biography may have little to tell us about why a novelist writes well, but it can sometimes be helpful in understanding why a novelist writes badly.” TNR discusses E.M. Forster’s sexual naiveté. “So it is not insignificant, in reading such a purple passage, to learn that at the time he wrote it—in his mid-twenties—Forster actually did not know how men and women had sexual intercourse. This is hard to credit, but Forster himself said so. In her new biography of Forster, Wendy Moffat quotes from what he called his ‘Sex Diary,’ now in the library of King’s College, Cambridge, where the novelist reviewed the landmarks in his sexual development from childhood on.”