E. M. Forster arrived in Alexandria in 1915. He was thirty-six and already an established writer, with four novels and a collection of short stories behind him and a fifth novel written but unseen. Forster's was a unique voice, even from the start, large and marked by a generous humanism that has not found its equal in contemporary British fiction. He had already toured Greece, Italy, and India, and his early fiction reflects this contact with worlds that call into question the values of upper-middle-class England, the values of home, just as it reflects the special perception a homosexual brings to a heterosexual, and alien, world. (p. 82)

E. M. Forster's homosexuality shaped his writing—I'd venture to say, more than any other force did. And it influenced those works that do not explicitly deal with homosexuals every bit as much as it affected Maurice and the stories in The...