Three cheers for Morgan Forster

I'm now re-reading Wendy Moffat's suberb life of Forster and noticed having read it rather cursorily the first time. I think I was reading modern day attitudes and journeys back into the past and saw the text through 21st century "Gay Icon" lenses. Being rather vary with group identities and loyalties Forster's attitudes seemed partially distancing and foreshadowing some unpleasant tendencies in the modern age - and some still do, like his suspicion of women and letting escape from his otherwise sharp vision their awful middle class shackles of respectability and "purity".

But his was a deadly serious moral pursuit, just the thing expected of us, of taking responsibility for our own beings and thinking hard and straight (puns unintended) about our bodies and souls and their various placements and the moral implications of those placements, those actions and impulses and their relations to the ever imperfect, cruel and unjust general society. In his seemingly timid and gentle person there was a lion's heart fighting unflinchingly terrible injustices around and terrible insufficiencies inside. A fighter's life.