The Longest Journey
About this ebook
Rickie Elliot enters Cambridge as a young man, exploring his interests in poetry and art and joining a circle of intellectuals centered around a philosopher named Stewart Ansell. An orphan, Rickie cherishes his small number of friends, including Agnes and her brother Herbert, who were his only companions as a youth. When Agnes’s fiancé dies in a football match, Rickie steps in to console her, and the two become engaged. Shortly afterward, a visit to Rickie’s elderly Aunt leads to his discovery of a stepbrother named Stephen, and the young scholar is plunged into the past and forced to face his family’s secret history. While Agnes, now his wife, encourages him to reject Stephen, Rickie struggles with his feelings and takes his frustration out on his pupils at the dormitory school where he has been appointed to teach classics. Cut off from his Cambridge friends, and growing apart from Agnes, Rickie makes an effort to connect with Stephen, who has grown to be a troubled young man. Between literary fame and married life, the bonds of family and friendship, Rickie’s story of hardship and personal development poses poignant questions regarding social conventions, infidelity, and the life of a struggling artist. The Longest Journey is a powerful bildungsroman and the second novel published by English literary icon E.M. Forster.
With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of E.M. Forster’s The Longest Journey is a classic of English literature reimagined for modern readers.
About the author
E.M. Forster (1879-1970) was an English novelist. Born in London to an Anglo-Irish mother and a Welsh father, Forster moved with his mother to Rooks Nest, a country house in rural Hertfordshire, in 1883, following his father’s death from tuberculosis. He received a sizeable inheritance from his great-aunt, which allowed him to pursue his studies and support himself as a professional writer. Forster attended King’s College, Cambridge, from 1897 to 1901, where he met many of the people who would later make up the legendary Bloomsbury Group of such writers and intellectuals as Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, and John Maynard Keynes. A gay man, Forster lived with his mother for much of his life in Weybridge, Surrey, where he wrote the novels A Room with a View, Howards End, and A Passage to India. Nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature sixteen times without winning, Forster is now recognized as one of the most important writers of twentieth century English fiction, and is remembered for his unique vision of English life and powerful critique of the inequities of class.
