Dimensions
163 x 241 x 29mm
Rickie Elliot, sensitive, idealistic and gifted with a powerful imagination, misleads himself through his conventional desire for marriage and fatherhood. Falling for the beautiful yet superficial Agnes Pembroke, he gives up his writing ambitions and becomes a schoolmaster at a minor public school in order to marry her. So begins his journey away from the philosophical ideals of his Cambridge youth and his slow descent into a hollow world of rigid conformity and moral decay.
First published in 1907, 'The Longest Journey' is the most personal of Forster's novels, and the one he claimed he was most glad to have written. Rickie Elliot and his friend Stewart Ansell together embody the moral debate raised by the Apostolic discussions of turn-of-the-century Cambridge, and although Rickie is finally undone by his persistent idealising, it is clear that in his character Forster saw a lot of himself.
