https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5508-000X
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Rachel Potter, The ‘Inner Mumble’: Forster, Free Expression, and International PEN, The Cambridge Quarterly, Volume 50, Issue 2, June 2021, Pages 173–184, https://doi.org/10.1093/camqtly/bfab011
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Extract
Throughout his life, Forster was a staunch defender of freedom of expression. He opposed the suppression of Lawrence’s The Rainbow in 1915, writing to Sir Henry Newbolt to encourage him to defend the novel because ‘the right to literary expression is as great in war as it was ever in peace, and in far greater danger, and I write on the chance of your being willing and able to protect it’.1 In 1928 he protested against literary censorship more publicly, signing letters to the press and offering to stand as a witness in the Radclyffe Hall Well of Loneliness trial. He also agreed to take on the unenviable task of approaching Hall on behalf of the Bloomsbury group, a meeting that famously played out extremely badly. Forster’s low opinion of her novel did not go down at all well with Hall. He spoke publicly in defence of James Hanley’s right to write freely about sex in his novel Boy in 1935 at the Paris Congrès International des Écrivains, a speech that was subsequently published as the essay ‘Liberty in England’. He defended and promoted Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable, a potentially problematic novel, in 1936. After a libel writ was issued against Abinger Harvest in 1934, he also protested against British libel law, and served as a literary representative on the Porter Committee on the Law of Defamation in 1939. He took the stand on behalf of Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover in the watershed 1960 trial of Penguin Books.
