ABSTRACT
Edward Morgan Forster was brought up in a household of women, dominated by his mother Lily. Forster was aware when he was very young that he was excited by males and not by females, and he long remained naïve about sexuality. He wrote that he did not know until he was thirty how men and women contacted each other sexually. Forster is primarily thought of as a novelist on the basis of his first five published novels, with A Passage to India the last of these. Forster's inhibited creativity in relation to writing fiction was certainly based on guilt and shame about forbidden homosexual themes. The story's bitter final paragraph is the last mention of a mother in Forster's fiction and the second half of the story is perhaps the best piece of fiction that Forster was able to write after A Passage to India. Sexuality and death are linked in this story.
