E M Forster

 

'Only Connect' sculpture

Hertfordshire Archives and Local Studies (DE/X1024/1/139/38)

Edward Morgan Forster (1879-1970), was the author of six acclaimed novels, including A Room with a View and A Passage to India. He lived at Rooks Nest with his widowed mother for ten years from 1893 and the house became the model for Howards End in Forster’s novel.

Forster described the rolling countryside around Rooks Nest as ‘the loveliest in England’ and both he and Poston campaigned against the encroachment of urban development on the open green space north of Stevenage. A sculpture entitled ‘Only Connect’ (the epigraph from Howards End) stands in St Nicholas’ churchyard in Stevenage, at the entrance to what has become known as ‘Forster Country.’