SOURCE: "Other Kingdoms: The Short Fiction," in E. M. Forster, Frederick Ungar Publishing, 1983, pp. 237-94.

In the following excerpt, Summers notes the importance of Forster's short fiction to our understanding of his artistic vision.

Forster is not a master of the short story. His importance as a writer rests on the novels and the nonfiction. Yet the stories are not negligible. Some of them are significant achievements in their own right, and taken together, they help reveal the complexity of Forster's art. They locate the source of some of his most characteristic effects in the tension generated by an imagination that is at once visionary and local, romantic and realistic. They make obvious the romantic base of his vision, tracing—in various ways and with varying degrees of success—the quest for a nostalgic wholeness, glimpsed fleetingly during those Wordsworthian "spots of time" in which the creative mind...